![]() ![]() Veritas presents the full story of Sabar’s seven-year investigation for the first time, drawing on more than 450 interviews, thousands of documents, and trips around the world to reveal the fascinating figures behind the forgery: an amateur Egyptologist–turned–pornographer and a scholar whose “ideological commitments” guided her practice of history. Shortly after, King publicly stated that the papyrus was probably a forgery. Then, journalist Ariel Sabar-who’d previously reported on the fragment for Smithsonian-published a piece in the Atlantic that called the authenticity of King’s “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” into question. ![]() For a time, the debate appeared to be at an impasse. The 2012 find was an instant sensation, dividing scholars, the press and the public into camps of non-believers who dismissed it as a forgery and defenders who interpreted it as a refutation of longstanding ideals of Christian celibacy. King announced the discovery of a 1,600-year-old papyrus that seemingly supported the novel’s much-maligned premise. Nine years after Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code popularized the theory that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, Harvard historian Karen L. Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife Her pithy, 304-page biography also interrogates Washington’s status as a slaveholder, pointing out that his much-publicized efforts to pave the way for emancipation were “mostly legacy building,” not the result of strongly held convictions. ![]() He’s just fine.” Treating the first president’s masculinity as a “foregone conclusion,” Coe explores lesser-known aspects of Washington’s life, from his interest in animal husbandry to his role as a father figure. You Never Forget Your First adopts a different approach: As historian Alexis Coe told Wulf earlier this year, “I don’t feel a need to protect Washington he doesn’t need me to come to his defense, and I don’t think he needed his past biographers to, either, but they’re so worried about him. You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George WashingtonĪccounts of George Washington’s life tend to lionize the Founding Father, depicting him as a “marble Adonis … rather than as a flawed, but still impressive, human being,” according to Karin Wulf of Smithsonian magazine. ![]() Read an excerpt from The Great Secret that ran in the September 2020 issue of Smithsonian magazine. The first chemotherapy based on nitrogen mustard was approved in 1949, and several drugs based on Alexander’s research remain in use today. Though the military covered up its role in the disaster for decades, the attack had at least one positive outcome: While treating patients, Alexander learned that mustard gas rapidly destroyed victims’ blood cells and lymph nodes-a phenomenon with wide-ranging ramifications for cancer treatment. Allied leaders were quick to place the blame on the Germans, but Alexander found concrete evidence sourcing the contamination to an Allied shipment of mustard gas struck during the bombing. “We began to realize that most of our patients had been contaminated by something beyond all imagination,” Rees later recalled.Īmerican medical officer Stewart Francis Alexander, who’d been called in to investigate the mysterious maladies, soon realized that the sailors had been exposed to mustard gas. Within days of the attack, writes Jennet Conant in The Great Secret, the wounded started exhibiting unexpected symptoms, including blisters “as big as balloons and heavy with fluid,” in the words of British nurse Gwladys Rees, and intense eye pain. When the Nazis bombed Bari, a Mediterranean port city central to the Allied war effort, on December 2, 1943, hundreds of sailors sustained horrific injuries. The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster that Launched the War on Cancer “It is about power-which groups have it and which do not.” “The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson explains. Dividing people into categories ensures that those in the middle rung have an “inferior” group to compare themselves to, the author writes, and maintains a status quo with tangible ramifications for public health, culture and politics. A more accurate characterization is “ caste system”-a phrase that better encapsulates the hierarchical nature of American society.ĭrawing parallels between the United States, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson identifies the “ eight pillars” that uphold caste systems: Among others, the list includes divine will, heredity, dehumanization, terror-derived enforcement and occupational hierarchies. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning author tells NPR, “racism” is an insufficient term for the country’s ingrained inequality. In this “ Oprah’s Book Club” pick, Isabel Wilkerson presents a compelling argument for shifting the language used to describe how black Americans are treated by their country. ![]()
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