Two of the more interesting items in my library are a world atlas published in the 1930s and the set of encyclopedias my parents bought for their growing family in the early 1950s. The former provides a picture of the world as it existed when my parents were in their adolescent years, before adulthood confronted my nineteen-year-old father in the form of a draft notice that sent him to World War II—ultimately, to a place he likely had never heard of before, the island of Guam. The latter depicts the world as it existed at the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its communist allies in China and Eastern Europe. It captures the beginning of the end of European colonialism in Asia, but predates its wholesale demise in the 1960s that led to the creation of...