![]() ![]() It was not long before Time, Newsweek, and the wire services began to experiment with new visual mapping techniques popularized by Harrison. Most professional cartographers celebrated his provocative style for its ability to foster a more dynamic understanding of geographical relationships, and the military hired Harrison to make maps for soldiers in the field and to help train pilots to understand regions that had yet to be photographed from the air. The public welcomed Harrison's images: The first edition of his atlas sold out before it even hit the shelves, and throughout the war he was inundated with requests for maps drawn with his signature techniques. Americans had been reared on the Mercator map of the world, a sixteenth-century projection designed for navigation but which created immense distortions at the far northern and southern latitudes. The urgency of the war, coupled with the advent of aviation, fueled the demand not just for more but different maps, particularly ones that could explain why President Roosevelt was stationing troops in Iceland, or sending fleets to the Indian Ocean. War has perennially driven interest in geography, but World War II was different. "a city of maps," one where "it is now considered a faux pas to be caught without your Pacific arena." Two of the largest commercial mapmakers reported their largest sales to date in 1941, and by early 1942 Newsweek had named Washington, D.C. Two years later, the attack on Pearl Harbor again sparked a demand for maps. ![]() In fact, Rand McNally reported selling more maps and atlases of the European theaters in the first two weeks of September than in all the years since the armistice of 1918. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and by the end of the day a map of Europe could not be bought anywhere in the United States. ![]() From the elaborate and innovative inserts in the National Geographic to the schematic and tactical pictures in newspapers, maps were everywhere. More Americans came into contact with maps during World War II than in any previous moment in American history. ![]()
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