Panama is a historical novel based on Henry Adams's imagined part in unraveling the French Panama Canal scandal at the end of the nineteenth century. The primary social concern of Panama is the tension between past and present—the order of the pre-industrial era and the chaos of industrial age progress. Author Eric Zencey is a social ecologist and historian who has studied Henry Adams extensively.

In Virgin Forest, a collection of his essays, Zencey discusses Adams's awareness "that the orienting traditions of political life were crumbling in the face of industrial and social change." Had Adams truly been involved in the Panama affair, the scandal most likely would have signified to him the political "crumbling" of which he theorized as a natural result of the industrialization that so disturbs the character Henry Adams throughout Panama.

The tension that results from rapid technological advancement is...