Rebecca Onion, writing for Slate’s The Vault blog:
This “Histomap,” created by John B. Sparks, was first printed by Rand McNally in 1931.
This giant, ambitious chart fit neatly with a trend in nonfiction book publishing of the 1920s and 1930s: the “outline,” in which large subjects (the history of the world! every school of philosophy! all of modern physics!) were distilled into a form comprehensible to the most uneducated layman.
This is pretty cool. It visually depicts the march of civilization.
You can also grab the high-resolution version.
