In this fascinating history of Cold War cartography, Timothy Barney
considers maps as central to the articulation of ideological
tensions between American national interests and international
aspirations. Barney argues that the borders, scales, projections,
and other conventions of maps prescribed and constrained the means
by which foreign policy elites, popular audiences, and social
activists navigated conflicts between North and South, East and
West. Maps also influenced how identities were formed in a world
both shrunk by advancing technologies and marked by expanding and
shifting geopolitical alliances and fissures. Pointing to the
necessity of how politics and values were "spatialized" in recent
U.S. history, Barney argues that Cold War–era maps themselves
had rhetorical lives that began with their conception and
production and played out in their circulation within foreign
policy circles and popular media. Reflecting on the ramifications
of spatial power during the period,
Mapping the Cold War
ultimately demonstrates that even in the twenty-first century,
American visions of the world--and the maps that account for
them--are inescapably rooted in the anxieties of that earlier
era.