Mapping What Ails Us

Dictatorial sway over the press so alarmed Carl W. Ackerman, the first dean of the Columbia School of Journal­ism, that he set out to map it. From his office in Morningside Heights, Ackerman observed a “world-wide epidemic of governmental domination” radiating out of China and the Soviet Union and spreading throughout Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa. By the time he finished, in late 1937, pockets of North and South America, including Quebec and Alberta, had already been infected with “varying degrees of control, censorship and intimidation.”

The New York Times ran Ackerman’s map on January 3, 1938, and was followed by hundreds of other papers — from the Globe and Mail to the Lincoln Evening Journal, from the Oakland Tribune to the Orlando Sentinel — that either reprinted or described it for their readers. In today’s parlance, “The Black Plague of the Twentieth Century” was a cartographic meme that went viral.

“As I...