"I have read Ethical Atheist's study of the idea of the flat earth with great respect as well as great interest.  It advances the state of the question considerably, and it is, as all scholarship should be, open-minded in treating the evidence.  I shall be revising my own book in one way or another to accommodate its insights.  Though we continue to disagree on some important points (the evidence still, I think, supports my view that some Darwinists used the flat-earth myth as a weapon against conservative Christians), we do agree on almost all the other points.  I am going to re-examine the ambiguity of some of the Church Fathers on the subject; also, work needs to be done on the reception of the Letronne-Irving views in the late 1840s-1850s.  Though I was able, at Stanford, to check US textbooks back to the 1860s, texts before then are very scarce, and I have also not examined many European textbooks.  The decade of the 1850s thus needs filling in.  Of course all Darwinists did not use this crude weapon against Christianity (though many did), and contemporary atheists such as Richard Dawkins (who has not to my knowledge mentioned it) and Stephen Jay Gould (who specifically accepts the evidence that the flat earth in the Middle Ages is a myth) do not make this mistake.  I do not mean to imply that Irving and Letronne were in a conspiracy.  Nor do I imply that Boorstin is evil: he is simply a very lazy historian relying on his fame to avoid looking at original sources.  I welcome Ethical Atheist's new e-book and any further discussion based on evidence."
       - Jeffrey B. Russell, 5/10/2002, author of "Inventing the Flat Earth" ^[1] and Professor of History, Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara

(Russell's Book)

We felt that Russell's review of our Flat Earth eBook ^[3] deserved a separate page because, after all, he wrote the book that caused us to begin our own research on this controversial subject.

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Subsequent email:

From Jeffrey Russell
jeffbrussell@aol.com
Fri Jun  7 01:35:24 2002.

I mentioned Reinhard Krueger to you.  I discovered that he published, in 2000, two volumes of a work called Eine Welt ohne Amerika (A world without America, with 866 (yes 866) pages on the shape of the earth from 60 BCE to 1080 CE.  I am going to order it from the publishers.

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References:
¹  "Inventing the Flat Earth", by Jeffrey Russell 10/9/92 New York Praeger 1991
²  "The Myth of the Flat Earth", Summary by Jeffrey Burton Russell, for the American Scientific Affiliation Conference; August 4, 1997 at Westmont College, http://www.id.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/RUSSELL/FlatEarth.html.
³  "The Flat Earth:  A Detailed Study of Personal Bias & Historical Thinking", an eBook by the Ethical Atheist, 2002.

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- Ethical Atheist
[Created: 05/23/2002]
[Last Update: 07/02/2002]