Subject: Re: [HM] Flat earth fallacy
From: Gordon Fisher (gfisher@shentel.net)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2000 - 19:03:59 EST
This was discussed on a while back on this list. Reference was made to a
book by Jeffrey Russell called *Inventing the Flat Earth*. Here is a
description of the book taken from the amazon.com site (where the book is
reported as presently unavailable):
"Book Description
Neither Christopher Columbus nor his contemporaries
thought the earth was flat. Yet this curious illusion persists today, firmly
established with the help of the media, textbooks, teachers--even noted
historians. Inventing the Flat Earth is Russell's attempt to set the record
straight. He begins with a discussion of geographical knowledge in the
Middle Ages, examining what Columbus and his contemporaries actually did
believe, and then moves to a look at how the error was first propagated in
the 1820s and 1830s and then "snowballed" to outrageous proportions by the
late 19th century. But perhaps the most intriguing focus of the book is
the reason why we allow this error to persist. Do we prefer to languish in
a comfortable and familiar error rather than exert the effort necessary to
discover the truth? This uncomfortable question is engagingly answered."
[end quote]
As I recall it, I believe the general consensus among people who have
looked at this question from the standpoint of its fictional nature is that
this error emanated in the USA from a work by the writer Washington Irving
(1783-1859). Evidently the error was also propagated in France about the
same time by Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848). There is a sketch of
Russell's research on this by Russell himself at
http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/LIBRARY/RUSSELL/FlatEarth.html
I got about 1400 hits for the string Washington Irving flat earth on
the search engine called Google.
Gordon Fisher gfisher@shentel.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Mon Feb 21 2000 - 19:27:11 EST