James A. Mackay - Accusations of Plagiarism

Accusations of Plagiarism

In 1998, he published a biography of Alexander Graham Bell. It was on the market briefly before Robert V. Bruce published a damning indictment, detailing sustained plagiarism of his own work, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Far from being a little-known work, the latter had in fact won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. The indictment, published in the American Historical Association's house journal, counted instances of plagiarism on 80 percent of the pages published. Mackay paid his publishers to withdraw the book from circulation, and Bruce agreed not to sue.

Mackay then published a biography of John Paul Jones, the founder of the US Navy. While initially well received, and the subject of flattering reviews in the trade press, it was soon discovered that it was practically a copy of what those same reviews had marked as the last work on the man, that by Samuel Eliot Morison in 1942. That biography too had won the Pulitzer.

Columbia University history professor David Armitage was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the book was "a spectacular and sustained act of plagiarism."

Despite these accusations, Mackay continued to be commissioned to write articles for the philatelic press and it has been said that almost the entire text of some editions of Stamp & Coin Mart, a popular British magazine, were written by him.