Introduction: Cold War–Era News Maps in Historical Context

Abstract

The onset of the Cold War in 1945 brought significant changes to global geopolitics. Great Britain and the United States felt compelled to reexamine their relationship with their former ally, the Soviet Union, and, by 1949, with newly communist China. The postwar division of Europe, the advent of the Air Age, the decline of the British Empire, and the Containment Doctrine highlighted differences between British and American foreign policies. The future of the famed “special relationship” between England and the United States was uncertain. In this pivotal era, maps appearing in British and American national news journals served as valuable tools to relate “new realities” of the Cold War to millions of readers. This map imagery was often powerful, even more so than the printed word. The news journals in which the maps appeared were extensions of national political parties that promoted specific ideas about the political world with cartographic imagery. But British and American news maps often depicted the early Cold War world in very different ways. A study of these maps reveals differences, both obvious and subtle, in how American and British societies viewed global geopolitics in the early years of the Cold War. Moreover, serial news journal maps provide a sort of chronology of political opinion on enduring Cold War crises. British and American cartographic portrayals of the Cold War world over time can be tracked and compared alongside contemporary texts. And if the axiom about journalism being the “first draft of history” is true for the Cold War era, then news maps provided the first historical map imagery of the period.