1968: The Global Revolutions

As the Vietnam War escalated in the mid 1960s, American academics, officials, and activists sought to understand and classify a far-off nation about which they possessed scant knowledge. As one Senator would note in the midst of the conflict, “There has probably never been a war in which we knew so little about the people with whom and against whom we are fighting.” Mapping the terrain of the region was therefore a prime necessity. And the cartographic war was as contested as any battlefield, with communist maps dividing the South into “Liberated Areas,” “Temporarily Occupied Areas” and “Contested Areas,” and American charts offering the portentous margin note that their boundary representations were “not necessarily authoritative.”