ABSTRACT
By opening his Dispatches from Vietnam with this ‘really old map’, the war-reporter Michael Herr rooted them in the oldest traditions of war journalism. ‘War news’, writes a historian of the sixteenth century, ‘is one of the first kinds to appear’. By the 1570s, such reportage was often supplemented by the narrative aid provided by a new map. In 2 Tamburlaine, the siege of Balsera is dramatized immediately after Tamburlaine’s lengthily technical lecture to his sons on the ‘rudiments of war’, a passage often cited as evidence of Christopher Marlowe’s waning imagination in the sequel. In the urgent days of 1588, when danger indeed lay at our doors, Tamburlaine’s lecture duplicated for a broader audience the technicalities of modern war. By opening his Dispatches from Vietnam with this ‘really old map’, the war-reporter Michael Herr rooted them in the oldest traditions of war journalism. The great mapmaker Ortelius claimed that knowledge of geography was ‘The eye of History’.
