Setting the Unreal Record Straight

Last week, Unreal revealed that professor Graham Peck, an associate history professor at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, had made a stunning discovery: A reporter from Riverfront Times had attended and written an account of the Lincoln-Douglas debate at the Illinois State Fair — back in 1854!

Try as we might, Unreal was unable to corroborate the professor's research. That didn't stop us, of course. (It never does.) So we waxed rhapsodic, summoning to our mind's eye a nineteenth-century alter ego who'd have covered the epic tilt with Unreal incisiveness and panache. Which is to say lazily, and from the hospitality tent, and stoked on whiskey and sarsaparilla.

Now comes word from Joseph Moore, media relations director at Saint Xavier, that mistakes were made: The sentence about RFT had been inserted into the press release in error, the result of a miscommunication within the media-relations department.

We pass along this news with the aim of un-besmirching the good name of Professor Peck, the fruits of whose scholarship can be glimpsed at www.sxu.edu/administrative/media_relations/peck.asp and in greater detail in this summer's issue of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.

And, alas, so much for Ye Olde Riverfront Times.