A new front in the history wars? A new article on 'the five'

[PaulB]

Touché!

As this thread has been recently revived, and just for the sake of completeness, it's possibly worth making the point that the exchange with Paul Mangan to which you drew attention was provoked by Rubenhold tweeting a post on JTR Forums which Howard Brown had posted five months (I think it was) earlier. The cynics among us might think she tweeted and misrepresented a five month old post from what was then a moribund thread in the hope of provoking a response. Only Managan bit, but...

[MrBarnett]

Yesterday’s (fake) news, in my opinion. :-)

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock! I've lurked for awhile, but this is my first reply to a post.

What I'm talking about is having some kind of document or spreadsheet and make it available to the public. Jonathan posted some of his notes and it looks like that he and the other roundtable contributors already basically did a side-by-side comparison of errors and omissions versus the correct information. My suggestion is to organize the information, perhaps by chapter, convert the document into a PDF, and post something here in the forum with a link. This way, all of the information is in one place and it's easily found with a Google search. The goal should be to provide the information for people to find so they can decide for themselves. This would especially be helpful to any postgrad students or academics who may be writing a dissertation or journal article that examines Rubenhold's work. I did discuss Rubenhold and the conclusions in The Five with my cousin who's involved in women's studies academia here in the States. She is familiar with the case and when I told her about Rubenhold's conclusions, she started laughing. She had not read the book, but she did advise me that some of her peers had, and they were not impressed with Rubenhold's work. So not everyone in academia agrees with Rubenhold. So my suggestion is to post the notes for informational purposes and to let it go. Let Google do the rest of the work.

Hi Linotte,

It’s certainly interesting to hear that not everyone agrees with all of her conclusions because we only ever hear from one side which has been a wave effusive comments from her uncritical supporters and from book reviewers who know little or nothing about the subject. It’s not solely her conclusions which can be called into question of course but the picture she paints of Ripperology as a kind of closed shop of sexism and misogyny which almost forced her to become an ‘outsider’ looking in and set a good guy/bad guys narrative.

Your idea is a good one. It might be worth dropping Jon Menges a pm.

[Linotte]

Hi Herlock,

I will PM him later today.

It seems that a lot of the effusive praise for the book comes out of academia in the UK. This is only my observation, but it seems to be much smaller than ours in the US. And she does have ride-or-die fans and a clique within her field that supports her. Based on her conduct toward people who disagree with her or post less-than-glowing reviews about the book, I don’t think many people feel comfortable reviewing the book. I certainly don’t, but I’ve seen much worse happen with reviews in publishing. I think other people just shrug and let it go. People like her are often their own worst enemy because they’re so wrapped up in their ego, they don’t consider all of the possible ramifications of their actions.

[Losmandris]

There appear to be no serial killer worshipping weirdos on casebook however I've become disenchanted with the endless threads on witnesses that have been turned into suspects eg Lechmere and numerous threads on the diary. While there seems to be very little debate about sensible suspects. I'm wondering has Ripperology become a parody of itself.

I have to agree with there John. Things do seem to have the ability to go off on wild tangents at the mo! Can get a little trying.

[jmenges]

I will PM him later today.

Hi Linotte!

PM received. Reply sent.

It was good to hear from you.

JM

[Columbo]

There appear to be no serial killer worshipping weirdos on casebook however I've become disenchanted with the endless threads on witnesses that have been turned into suspects eg Lechmere and numerous threads on the diary. While there seems to be very little debate about sensible suspects. I'm wondering has Ripperology become a parody of itself.

I also agree with you. Sensibility has lost ground in the research, particularly when it comes to the list of suspects. I find the actual facts of the case much more interesting then the pet theories, although some are pretty good.