It amazed me, to think that people, who had no means of mass communication, knew about Kennedy and the assassination; his popularity was truly international.
Back in 1980 I was in Mogadishu, Somalia. While there, I met a group of American students traveling around the world in a ship borne-floating college. One of the students was working on a sociology project wherein she asked local people at each port of call to draw a map of their local area and of the world as they understood it.
She said that nearly all of the respondents in nearly all of the ports drew maps analogous to the one you posted. That is, “I live here. The people I have an interest in live there. Places and people I have heard of, but have no real interest in live way over there.”
I have been privileged to have traveled over a good part of the world. I have used maps for everything from orienteering to flying my aircraft internationally. The nations in which I have worked & lived I can place on a map, in relation to their neighbors and in a fairly accurate shape and area.
However, I could not place Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan accurately on a map. I have never been anywhere near these countries and I have no particular interest in any of them.
Cutting short my rambling discourse, I would just say that nearly everyone on earth, not just Americans, would draw a similar self-centered map of the world.
It amazed me, to think that people, who had no means of mass communication, knew about Kennedy and the assassination; his popularity was truly international.