A discussion thread, “Popular vs. Academic History,” was innocently (presumably) started by Prof. Kristen Stapleton (University of Kentucky) March 14, 2005. In Timothy May's review (H-Asia March 4) of Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2004), the following passage attracted her attention:

Despite all of [the book’s] acclaim, it is very clear that Weatherford is not a historian. In the general narrative Weatherford is sufficiently accurate. However, in the details, Weatherford is wrestling with material that he clearly does not fully appreciate. It is important to remember that the book is intended for the general public and thus certain allowances are often made, usually in the form of generalizations.

Prof. Stapleton continued:

I am interested in the question of what allowances are made – and what allowances ought to be made, if any – for books on historical topics intended for the general public. I am sure there has been a lot written about this over the years. Has anyone put together a bibliography on this subject that they are willing to share with me?

Useful postings followed in a thread titled “Popular vs. Academic History.” On March 16, Thomas DuBois (Department of History, National University of Singapore) suggested:

One tactic might be to compare academic and non-academic writing on the same topic, and for this the two books that immediately come to mind are Iris Chang's Rape of Nanjing and Gavin Menzies's 1421 The Year China Discovered America. In the case of the former, the argument could be made that Chang did resurrect an issue in the public mind, which then provoked or at least reinvigorated academic debate on the topic. Much of this took the form of debunking the very small number of Japanese historians who deny the existence of the massacre, but in any case there was a crossover between public and academic world. In the case of the latter, the book has little if any academic merit and few professional historians take it at all seriously.

Dubois noted that there was at least one serious review: Robert Finlay's “How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America,”Journal of World History (June 2004).

Others contributed more references. The exchange became positively boisterous when Geoff Wade of Singapore University (dated June 18, posted June 19) posted his piece, “1421 And All That,” prompted by an exhibit in Singapore which featured Menzies. Wade writes:

the book claims that during one of the Zheng He voyages beginning in 1421, various sub-fleets circumnavigated Australia, reached the Americas, sailed around Greenland and generally mapped the world. That there is not one single piece of recognised evidence to support these claims seems to have made no difference to the author or his supporters. Mr Menzies is seen by some as mildly eccentric and by others as a dangerous charlatan. He has a powerful marketing machine behind him which is continually producing new “evidence” to keep sales of the book (as well as paintings and now tours of Southeast Asia, for which see Menzies' website) booming. He remains, like Erich von Daniken, author of the infamous Chariots of the Gods, surrounded by a group of avid acolytes, but lacking all academic respectability.

After an interchange during which the thread was re-named “Popular History and Bunkum,” Wade dropped a bombshell in a posting of October on by announcing:

I have just submitted the following complaint against Transworld Publishers of Britain to the Consumer Complaints body of the United Kingdom.... The complaint derives from Transworld publishing and advertising 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, authored by Gavin Menzies, as a work of history, which I believe is a violation of the British Trade Descriptions Act of 1968 ... [which] I purchased ... on the basis that it was classified as “History” in their catalogue. A detailed reading of the text revealed that the work is a fairtytale and fiction of the worst kind....

Wade then lists ten claims made by Menzies and a refutation of each. He concludes:

In short, all major claims within the work are fictional. Representing this work as history is a flagrant violation of the Trade Descriptions Act of 1968 which makes it an offence both to apply a false description to any goods and to supply or offer to supply any goods which have a false trade description applied.

This provoked discussion! The thread “Popular History and Bunkum – on _1421, The Year China Discovered America_” continued. Another thread was started, “Classification of books (was 1421),” to heatedly opine about ethics among cataloguers and the lack of same among certain publishers.

Prof. Mary Goldin objected that Wade’s theory would revoke the Dewey decimal number of Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization. Wade replied (November 10) that the Beards

proceeded from recognised historical phenomena (that there were people known as “Founding Fathers”, that there was a system of slavery in place, that there was a Civil War, etc.) and interpreted these things in a way which differed from the mainstream. Most historians will accept this as a valid manifestation of the diversity of historical explanation (surely, one of the great beauties of the discipline).

But, Wade continued, his objections to Menzies did not lie in differences in “interpreting historical evidence” or an “author's interpretations of historical evidence.” Wade initially considered the 1421 book and others to be the products of

charlatans who had convinced publishers of the commercial merit of their fabrications. However... the original text offered to the publishers was nothing like the published work. It was half the size and had a very different focus. Menzies himself admits that the publishers rewrote it for him, obviously to suit their marketing needs. ...The deception and responsibility for it is thus very much joint....What we have therefore is ... a corporation manipulating a manuscript, in itself already false, and then classifying it as history, in order to improve marketing and maximize profits.

And on November 23, came the comment: “OK already! This is becoming very personal. Menzies has the same freedom of speech and publication as any other capitalist entrepreneur. Who cares? Brown is doing exactly the same thing with the Da Vinci Code and we are not seeing endless notes about that.”

This all doesn’t even get to the discussion of Chang and Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (2005).

As Noel Coward once said, “I couldn’t have enjoyed it more!”

(For those who want to read the whole exchange, go to H-ASIA: http://www.h-net.org/logsearch/ . With the Boolean option turned on and the date option set for “not before March 2005,” a search for “Menzies NOT Australia” will now yield nearly forty hits.)