This is not the best Sesame Street clip ever.  In fact, by the standards of Sesame Street clips, it’s not even very good.  But it’s still cool, if only because Grover has what looks like the Peters projection on the wall rather than the more common (and wildly inaccurate) Mercator projection.  The Peters projection represented an effort to offer a more realistic, albeit still two-dimensional, picture of the globe, a picture that wouldn’t distort the size of North America and Europe, thereby “foster[ing],” as The West Wing taught us (see below), “European imperialist attitudes for centuries, and creating an ethnic bias against the Third World [ed. note:  we don’t say Third World any more, but whatevs].  Which is just a long way of saying that, yes, the Children’s Television Workshop was nothing more than a Maoist front.  And Mitt Romney was right:  we should have strangled Big Bird when he was still just a fledgeling.

I bring all of this up, because the third chapter of the new book is all about the politics of cartography.  Long story short, in the course of searching for the location of the Sand Creek killing field, the Park Service believed that it found the site where Black Kettle’s village had stood on the eve of the massacre.  The Cheyenne descendants disagreed with the NPS and felt betrayed that their perspective received short shrift when the NPS created a map of the site, including Black Kettle’s village.  The result was a controversy that still looms over the Sand Creek memorial today, clouding efforts to interpret the historic site for the public.