James A. Mackay

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James Alexander Mackay is a Scottish historian and philatelist, twice accused of wholesale plagiarism.

He was born in Inverness in 1936. His parents moved to Glasgow, where he went to school and university.

Interested in stamps and the postal system from an early age, he wrote two acclaimed histories of the Scottish posts; one limited to St. Kilda and, in 1978, his History of Scottish Postmarks, 1693-1978, the definitive work on the subject.

He then turned to biography, where he was less successful. Through the 1980s he worked on the poet Burns, publishing in 1992 a well-reviewed biography. Subsequent biographies of Allan Pinkerton and William Wallace were released to mixed reviews.

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.

The next year (1998), Mackay 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."