[PW] flat earth?

[Even Flood]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 5:28 PM, Pam Rider <tsktsk at tns.net> wrote:
> I am just looking for sources supporting or questioning the following. I
>  question the statement as definitive. My understanding is that, although
>  a number of mathematicians since early Egyptian times calculated a round
>  earth, this did not enter the public consciousness until much later.
>
>  Are there sources that question?:
>
>  "The idea that Columbus and his contemporaries thought that the
>  Earth was flat is a twentieth-century invention. It was the work of
>  somebody who wrote a children's biography of Columbus about a hundred
>  years ago. I don't have the actual citation at hand, but Stephen Jay
>  Gould wrote a column about it.
>
>  The Earth's shape was proven in Ancient Egypt about 500 B.C.E.,
>  which was 2,000 years before Columbus. There are probably more people
>  today who believe in a flat earth than there were 500 years ago."
>  --
>  Best,
>  Pam Rider
>  http://users.tns.net/~pamrider/
>  http://tinyurl.com/4bz8w
>  Trying to walk cheerfully on the Earth
>

Pam, I can suggest two books about the flat earth and the history of
that idea. One, quite recent that I have not read:

Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood
Macmillan
ISBN-10: 140504702X
ISBN-13: 978-1405047029
(From amazo.uk.co)

and
Inventing the Flat Earth - Columbus and Modern Historians
bu Jefferey Burton Russel
Praeger publishers, 1992
ISBN 0 275 95904 x
which I have read, and it is very good. He writes about the modern
myth that people believed the earth was flat in 1492 and Columbus was
the one hero that thought it was round and acted on it. (The truth is
different)

Even

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Even Hartmann Flood, Senior Academic Librarian
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