The 5-foot-long chart below has an ambitious goal: To record 4,000 years of history in a single graphic. Drawn by John B. Sparks of Rand McNally and Company in 1931, the chart traces world history from the Egyptian Empire through the Assyrians, Persians, Romans and Huns through the early 20th Century. It’s clearly a Eurocentric and dated view of the world’s history: The colors represent different racial groupings, as they were perceived in the 1930s – “Mediterranean People,” “Alpine People,” and “Mongolian People.” The width ostensibly shows the rise and fall of these groupings, though that metric seems far from...