" :The debate we are talking about began in 1993 and abated by the end of the decade, thus I would consider it a ""prolonged, public, and heated"" disagreement"" and therefore think the word controversy is appropriate. The debate extended outward from academia and became a subject of national conversation because it related directly to larger concerns such as race, identity, and academic freedom. The debate spawned dozens of books, scholarly articles, and conferences and was consistently reported on in the press. A simple search of just the phrase ""Black Athena"" on JSTOR finds 642 scholarly articles published since 1987 when the book came out. The debate is, in fact, still ongoing. Lefkowitz published her
" :The debate we are talking about began in 1993 and abated by the end of the decade, thus I would consider it a ""prolonged, public, and heated"" disagreement"" and therefore think the word controversy is appropriate. The debate extended outward from academia and became a subject of national conversation because it related directly to larger concerns such as race, identity, and academic freedom. The debate spawned dozens of books, scholarly articles, and conferences and was consistently reported on in the press. A simple search of just the phrase ""Black Athena"" on JSTOR finds 642 scholarly articles published since 1987 when the book came out. The debate is, in fact, still ongoing. Lefkowitz published her first