Book excerpt: 'Created one hundred years ago, the Board has functioned to provide standardized spellings of geographic names to meet official U.S. requirements. It is the oldest body of its kind in the world. Without an independent budget, its programs reflected overall budgetary restrictions that affected its support agencies. Immediately prior to the Second World War, for example, the Board worked at a relatively slow pace. With the onset of that conflict, however, the Board's staff was greatly enlarged to provide names for new maps and charts needed by the U.S. armed services. In 1947 the Board was reorganized by Public Law 242 of the 80th Congress and given explicit missions to meet new requirements the nation had for geographic names on a global basis. Since that time, and in the present era of new nations and changed names, the Board has functioned as the world's foremost body of experts dealing with geographic names' -- page 1.