The Constitution wins!

[Lord Blackadder]

Incidentally, at least once that we know about, we had our work republished almost verbatim in a book, without even a citation! I only stumbled upon it by mistake. Annoying as it may be, this kind of thing is common, and not necessarily the result of vice. A lack of care, maybe, but rarely evil intent. The lesson: check your outrage at the door -- you might need it later!

That reminds me of the furor surrounding Steven Ambrose's casual way of citing things...

Books written for popular consumption certainly have a different feel than a book that has been assembled from journal articles or a thesis/dissertation.

I recently wrote a book review for a journal as a seminar exercise, and it has made me notice how little editing the editor of a book sometimes does, especially with scholarly books that consist of a number of chapters (each with a different author) "edited" by a more well-known author who might also write a lengthy intro and perhaps one chapter. Some are very tight, others just seem to have had the chapters farmed out to whoever they could get...

[Desertrat]

Sorta hard to see "scholarly error" when a guy claims to have read documents that burned up some 90+ years earlier.

And the various allegations were persuasive to the Bancroft folks, or the award would not have been rescinded.

'Rat

[IJ Reilly]

Sorta hard to see "scholarly error" when a guy claims to have read documents that burned up some 90+ years earlier.

And the various allegations were persuasive to the Bancroft folks, or the award would not have been rescinded.

'Rat

Not hard to see at all. Most of these historian "scandals" involve citation errors -- either a failure to cite something which came from another source, or incorrect citations. Generally the focus is on a handful of citations out of hundreds or even thousands in any given book -- as it appears to be in this case as well. FWIW, this historian claims that his research notes were largely destroyed in a flood in his office, which he unwisely attempted to reconstruct them from memory. I'm not ruling on the veracity of his claims, only on the plausibility of making lazy or sloppy errors of the kind that some are quick to attribute to deliberate fraud or deceit. Prizes don't go to sloppy scholars. However, the efforts on the part of some to turn this guy into an outright liar is, I suspect, no less ideologically motivated then his book was.