Welcome to Kenneth A. Rahn's Academic JFK Assassination Site. It takes its "academic" name from the fact that it attempts to approach the assassination in a way that is as scholarly, dignified, and rigorous as possible. This site exists to support my course PSC404, "The JFK Assassination," which is given each spring in the University of Rhode Island's Political Science Department. (This course, temporarily PSC482G, has just been made a permanent fixture of the Political Science Department--see Notices and Recent Additions.) The full body of materials from which this course is drawn (except for parts of the Warren Commission Report) are posted here. This archive is expanded regularly, so check frequently for new materials. In addition, there are the full materials from our 1999 Providence Conference, which was part of spring 1999's course, a series of short essays on selected important topics surrounding the assassination (most of which will eventually become parts of longer documents), and some recent abstracts submitted to JFK conferences. Enjoy! I encourage readers to submit comments to me at krahn@uri.edu.
    I am very pleased to announce the acquisition of about 600 MB of images and files from W. Anthony Marsh of Somerville, MA. This material will be known as The Marsh Collection. It can be accessed from this page or directly from its own index.  It may be months before the materials are fully catalogued, however, for the number of items is daunting.
    A further word about the "academic" name. The JFK "research community" is in a quagmire and remains that way because its members operate largely ad hoc—they feel their way along from point to point without any higher-level compass to guide them. The most important thing they should do is to forget the relentless chase for details and stop, step back a few steps, and examine their efforts theoretically and from a distance. They should learn the proper procedures for investigating a crime and operate that way. They should learn how to think critically and logically and vow never again to make an error in reasoning. They should educate themselves in the disciplines necessary to understand the physical evidence from the assassination, such as ballistics and traditional physics and chemistry. And most importantly, they should commit themselves to learning the truth, wherever it lies. Until they take these important steps, they will not and cannot know the full extent to which the assassination can be understood. Sadly, they are wasting their time and effort.
    Why go to all this "trouble"? For one thing, it's the right way to approach the assassination . But more importantly, it makes getting the right answer easy (where "right" is defined as the maximum extent of the answer, whether complete or incomplete, that is justified by the available evidence). I can state with surety, and will demonstrate in the coming months, that anyone in command of the core physical data and the principles of critical thinking can circumscribe the right answer to the assassination in a matter of minutes. Why then, you ask, has such a debate raged on for 37 years? Easy. It has been hijacked by critics who, knowingly or not, broke the rules of data-handling and thinking and dominated the debate by sheer decibels and repetition. That is also easy but time-consuming to demonstrate.
    My JFK course at the University of Rhode Island takes this academic approach. Each year it enlightens a significant fraction of the students who take it, often with striking results. That is also the goal of this web site—enlightenment though proper academic procedures. I welcome any and all reactions from readers, and will post them for all to see.

The basic parts of the JFK site
    Notices and recent additions to the site
    Reactions from readers
    
    Bibliography
    Conspiracy theories
    Conspiracy theory
    Critical thinking
    Critiques of books and articles
    Definitions
    Higher criticism
    History
    Issues and evidence
    Misc. documents
    Misc. images
    People, organizations, web sites
    Recent JFK abstracts
    Scientific topics
    Short essays
    The critics
    The JFK Assassination in Fiction
    The legal perspective
    The Marsh Collection
    The 1999 Providence Conference

PSC404, "The Assassination of John F. Kennedy" (Spring 2001 and later)

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