When I was of early elementary-school age, my mother mounted on the wall of our dining room a large, colored map of the world. Her doing so was a confluence of two impulses that often motivated her: a desire to encourage education, and a passion to instill the belief that all people of the world were one and were “children of God.” Some children in our neighborhood knew about that flat map on our dining-room wall (having visited our house for birthday parties). But no one ever accused my mother of believing that the Earth was flat. Everybody easily recognized that the flat paper map was a flattened representation of the Earth’s spherical surface.
Peculiarly, however, beginning in the 1800’s, some Western intellectuals began misinterpreting the flat diagrams of the Earth’s surface’s that had been made in the Middle Ages to mean that those people centuries earlier believed the Earth itself was flat.
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