Posted on 05/04/2012 8:05:33 PM PDT by kiryandil
Alwyn Ruddock, an 89-year-old historian, had all her notes & research materials detailing perhaps tremendous discoveries relating to John Cabot's voyages to the New World in the late 1490s posthumously destroyed.
This article, Rewriting History: Alwyn Ruddock and John Cabot, gives a lengthy retelling of that tale.
From what I can tell, it looks as though our good friend "Peer Review" or its relatives, well-known to us from the phony Global Warming money scam, is mostly responsible for the destruction of her astonishing research on Cabot and his predecessors.
Dr Evan Jones and his research partner, Margaret Condon, have set up a webpage, The Cabot Project, to try to recover most of this work, and expand on it with more eyes and minds.
Isn't "peer reviewing" wonderful?
Looks like she fixed their little red wagons for them, though. Good on her.
“peer review” ping
It'll blow your hair back.
From our good friends @ The Daily Mail, with the REAL news...
Really cool stuff. Makes me want to finish my book/thesis for the sake of posterity and scholarship.
Well, I guess they didn't expect her to join the suppression party, too...
Whoopsie! 78 bags of shredded research later...
Reminds me of what happened to a treasure hunter who later “committed suicide” when he found proof of a Hugenot French settlement in Panama.
I can’t remember his name!
My thesis in History was on a 1915 armed conflict along the Texas/Mexico border. The research led me to an inescapable conclusion that a border war flares up about every other generation and that the root cause is the mutual antipathy between the Hispanic/Mexican culture and the Scots/Irish/Texan culture.
I had most of the thesis chapters done, but when re-writing the opening statement it became apparent to me that the idea of a clash of cultures/mutual racism is so anti-PC that I knew I had a battle on my hands with the thesis committee— and after developing cancer and losing my home to Hurricane Ike I was unable to actively continue in the program and dropped out of school.
Makes me want to finish my book/thesis for the sake of posterity and scholarship.
They burnt her notes, and then the follow-up researchers publish her antithesis, not her thesis. And now the spin to protect what really is going on:
Why is the fact that bankers already knew that there was land proof that the land was discovered by the British, when the known previous explorer who supposedly didn’t “get” it was Italian, sailing for Spain? Why would an Anglo culture cover up the discovery by one Brit, so as to protect the status of another Brit?
The fact is that the Catholic Church knew very well that there was a New World. They had maintained a diocese of Greenland for centuries in North America, interrupted only by the plague. And the same founders of the diocese of Greenland were all over exactly where Cabot landed.
The catch is that the Church’s knowledge of Greenland was inspecific; the knowledge of Vinland known only to Icelanders and Scandinavians on either side of England, and only through Sagas, which came to be associated with paganism, and were not translated into Latin.
(For some clarity, the sagas were Christian works written in the old Norse language that became associated with Pagans. They frequently extolled “Christian” virtues of pagan forefathers, which were seen by many outside Scandinavia as extolling pagans.)
I have a bad tendency to write quickly, THEN double-check my facts. People who read my posts will frequently catch me making corrections such as these, logn befroe others hop in:
The sagas were very rarely translated; they were only translated into English in the late 19th century. But there were some much-neglected translations into other languages outside Scandinavia before then, and I’d presume that includes Latin.
Thanks for the ping. I am going to read more later.
Obituary: Alwyn Ruddock
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/feb/17/obituaries.mainsection
Thursday 16 February 2006
[snip] She eventually finished a draft of her book on Cabot, but destroyed it because it did not meet her exacting standards. She began work on the book again, but her progress was slowed by failing eyesight and declining health. This second version was not completed, and she left strict orders that all research papers were to be destroyed at her death. [/snip]
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GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
Thanks kiryandil. |
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Hunter states that she prepared a third volume on the Southampton port records, but it was somehow "stopped" and she accused Quinn of stopping it, which he denied. (WTF???)
She wrote a draft on English merchant activity in the Mediterranean in the first half of the sixteenth century, but for some reason the Hakluyt Society declined to bring it out. She then tried to publish this draft through Athlone (University of London publishing house), but no go.
She decided to give up on the academic presses, and publish a popular work through an agent. No go. Then she tried the University of Toronto Press in 1989, again no go.
Hunter: "Its difficult not to empathize somewhat with Ruddock, whose publishing failures should not be written off simply as the result of irascible eccentricity or hyper-perfectionism. She was clearly hurt by colleagues. Hostile committees or individuals at academic presses apparently repeatedly thwarted her publishing plans. Oxford University Press, the Hakluyt Society, and Harvester Press all turned down her projects."
Another Ruddock obituary says that she was "burned early in her career by another academic who used her unpublished research without attribution."
The last ditch was University of Exeter Press in late 1992, for a book to be produced before 1997. They didn't get a draft (in 5 years!!!). (aside - if it was that important in MY field, I would have had people wooing her for a draft.)
My take is that somebody(s) had it in for her for whatever reason, and they thought they'd be clever and hide behind the scenes. Well, they apparently succeeded TOO well, in my view.
Taken in whole, I incline to believe they deserve what she did. It's a shame, but it shows once again that the Academy has strayed far from its roots, like in the Global WarmScamming skullduggery.
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