Even the world atlases were confusing. Rand McNally’s wartime Ready Reference Atlas of the World, like many other atlases at the time, listed Hawai‘i, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as “foreign.” A class of seventh-grade girls at the Western Michigan College Training School in Kalamazoo scratched their heads over this. They’d been trying to follow the war on their maps. How, they wondered, could the attack on Pearl Harbor have been an attack on the United States if Hawai‘i was foreign? They wrote to Rand McNally to inquire. “Although Hawaii belongs to the United States, it is not an
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