Departments

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Forgery

  • SOURCE: Mother Jones
    12/6/2022

    SCOTUS Seems Poised to Overrule Democracy By Drawing on a Historical Forgery

    In 1818, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina sent John Quincy Adams a fake document that made it look like Pinckney was a principal author of the 1787 Constitution. At the time, the ruse was rejected. Why are Supreme Court conservatives looking to this document in to justify their decisions?  

  • SOURCE: Antigone Journal
    10/15/2022

    Adventures in Decoding Cicero's "Consolation"

    by Mike Fontaine

    After scholars argued inconclusively for centuries about whether a treatise on grief attributed to Cicero was a forgery, a computer program suggested it was. The author says the computer got it right, and expands on his own investigation. 

  • SOURCE: Charleston Post and Courier
    10/10/2021

    The Man Who Conned the Confederacy

    Samuel Upham's trade in counterfeit Confederate bills started to cash in on the craze for war souvenirs. It's possible that the U.S. Government helped him improve his operation to destabilize the Confederate currency. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    8/25/2021

    A Manhattan Dealer Sold Fake Antiquities for Decades

    The Manhattan DA's Antiquities Trafficking Unit filed charges against Mehrdad Sadigh, charging him with running an assembly line of distressing new items to sell them as ancient artifacts. 

  • SOURCE: Tablet
    8/4/2021

    The Franklin Prophecy and Antisemitic Forgery for Profit

    by Scott D. Seligman

    Remarks attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention calling for the exclusion of Jews from the new nation were concocted by "lifetime anticommunist and antisemitic nutjob" Willam D. Pelley in the 1930s. 

  • SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
    6/29/2021

    A Scholarly Screw-Up of Biblical Proportions

    by Ariel Sabar

    The author of a book on the high-profile forgery of papyrus fragments indicating Jesus had a wife discusses how an article based on those fraudulent documents passed peer review.