monsters_issue_7

It's GoatMan, Not GoatMonster Harold Goatman has no interest in attacking teenage lovers. He has no interest in jumping on to the hoods of cars, swinging an axe at terrified motorists. No, Goatman has just two things: A goat's head and a desire to be left alone. (Actually, he has a third thing: High blood pressure. And a cat. OK, there are lots of things, but few are relevant to the story.) Read more…   Monsters - Of Our Minds History, sadly, is as full of inaccuracies and falsehoods as it is sterling examples of scholarship and true-to-life narratives of sword fights. Caesar's "History of the Gallic Wars" is notoriously self-serving in its narrative and omissions, for example, while it turns out that Jules Michelet's pioneering history of witchcraft was based entirely on a pinball machine's graphics. Nowhere is this more evident than in historical depictions of monsters, which often turn out to be wildly exaggerated accounts of perfectly normal animals, or complete fabrications. In this monograph, Prof. Paul Hermler examines some of the most famous of these hoaxes. Read More...

April 15, 2008 It's no secret that monsters have a bad reputation. Some of that is deserved - they haunt our dreams, they hide under our beds, they destroy our credit. But is history being unfair? The Vince College Review aims to find out. Point/Counterpoint Viewpoint #1: Monsters have made valuable contributions to culture, government and society as a whole and deserve to be as revered as George Washington, Julius Caesar and Cameron Diaz -- the titans of history. Viewpoint #2: No, they don't. Such is the rigorous and high-minded debate readers can find in the pages of the Vince College Review as part of our regular "Point-Counterpoint" feature. This week, two leading scholars examine the role monsters have played in history and debate whether the likes of Romanian bloodsucker and nocturnal nobleman Count Dracula should be alongside Winston Churchill in the Heroes of World War II display at Madam Tussuad's. Read More... Recommended reading: "Incredibly tedious!" -Pope Benedict XVI "I really hated it!" - Everyone else Buy it today! Or don't!

Ah! Real Monsters! Everybody knows all about those fictional ghouls and goblins that are products of vivid imaginations – the Frankensteins, the Draculas, the werewolves, the locomotives, and so on. But we here at the Vince College Review are going to examine some actual monsters from history, which are very much real and are, in fact, the basis for all those Halloween-loving specters that exist only in the pages of books and on the silver screen. History's actual monsters are, or were, living, breathing beings that were so frightening, they struck terror in the hearts of their fellow man. This work is the result of literally hours of research done over the course of one mid-afternoon that relies on scholarly tools like "primary sources" and "computer" making this a serious piece of scholarship, not the script for a mummy-movie. So let's forget about fiction for a while and delve in to the history of these real-life monsters. Read more…

---

The Vince College Review is published every Tuesday, unless the editors' Spinning class gets bumped like the lady at the gym said it might.