ABSTRACT
S. W. Boggs was an academic and a bureaucrat, known for his pioneering work in political geography – but he traversed popular culture by worrying aloud about the public's engagement with cartography. This chapter describes about the kinds of cartographic conundrums of war and peace that he interfaced with as world space became 'closed' while the amount of interdependent global relationships grew exponentially. In terms of mapping's effect on the tensions between war and peace, the First World War also affirmed cartography as a 'carving knife' between self-determining nations, not just in terms of state boundaries, but of race, ethnicity, and language as well. However, the fact that a central agency was needed for research and cataloguing on the political aspects of geography and cartography revealed the immense importance that mapping had assumed on a global level. Cartography and geography itself underwent significant transformations during the transition to the Cold War.
