<html>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times">Visionaries:<br><br>
I've sent the following letter to the Daily News and the Lewiston
Tribune. Thanks to Tom for putting the texts on his website so
quickly and efficiently.<br><br>
To the Editor:<br><br>
Last August Douglas Wilson, pastor of Moscow’s Christ Church, reported
that he removed his booklet “Southern Slavery As It Was” from circulation
in January because of “some real problems with the footnotes” (<i>Daily
News</i> 8/6/03). Wilson said that he had “revised it and it is now
awaiting republication.” A year later the title is still listed as
out of print at Wilson’s Canon Press website, so I’m wondering what the
delay is.<br><br>
Is it because the principal of Carey Christian School in Carey, North
Carolina was forced to remove the slavery booklet from his students’
hands in December, 2004? How many other copies of this embarrassing
attempt at historical revisionism out there in conservative Christian
schools and neo-Confederate bookstores across the nation?<br><br>
Or is it because Wilson realized that there were more than just citation
problems with this outrageous little essay? Wilson claims that the
files that he received from his co-author Steve Wilkins were somehow
messed up. But it is inconceivable to me that, for example, a
subheading “The Myth of Slave Breeding” and an entire paragraph taken
from Fogel and Engerman’s <i>Time on the Cross</i> could have been a
simple transmission error. Twenty percent of the essay comes from this
source. See
<a href="http://www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/Plagiarism.htm" eudora="autourl">www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/Plagiarism.htm</a>
for facing pages.<br><br>
I now have more evidence about the deceptive ways in which Wilson and Wilkins do their “scholarly” research. On page 144 of his book on Robert E. Lee <i>Call to Duty</i>,Wilkins copies 220 words from C. B. Bracken’s book <i>Lee:The Last Years</i> before citing a short indented passage from this book. Without doing any research one is left with the impression that the preceding words are Wilkins’ own when in fact they are most definitely not his. <br><br>
Using the same writing techniques, Wilkins has also copied passages from D. S. Freeman’s <i>Robert E. Lee: A Biography</i> for his own book on Lee.</font><font face="Georgia"> I have written to both publishers</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times"> to inform them of these egregious infractions. Canon Press also sells another Wilkins title, and one wonders how many of those words are really Wilkins’ own.<br><br>
The facing pages from the three texts can be viewed at <a href="http://www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/SWP.htm" eudora="autourl">www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/SWP.htm<br><br>
</a></font><font size=4>Nick Gier, Moscow</font></html>