Russell held a number of academic posts, moving to the History Department at the
University of California, Santa Barbara until his retirement. He taught History and Religious Studies at Berkeley,
Riverside,
California State University, Sacramento,
Harvard,
New Mexico, and
Notre Dame. Russell published widely, largely on
medieval European history and the history of Christian
theology. His first book was
Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (1965). He is most noted for his five-volume history of the concept of
the Devil:
The Devil (1977),
Satan (1981),
Lucifer (1984),
Mephistopheles (1986) and
The Prince of Darkness (1988), all published by
Cornell University Press. In
Inventing the Flat Earth (1991) he argues that 19th century anti-
Christians invented and spread the falsehood that educated people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was
flat. As one writer summarizes, "Russell also examined a large selection of textbooks and found those written before 1870 usually included the correct account, but most textbooks written after 1880 uncritically repeated the erroneous claims in
Washington Irving,
John William Draper and
Andrew Dickson White. Russell concludes that Irving, Draper and White were the main writers responsible for introducing the erroneous
flat-earth myth that is still with us today." Russell wrote two books on the history of the notion of
Heaven:
A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (1997), which deals with the period from around 200 B.C. up to
Dante, and
Paradise Mislaid (2006), which takes the story up to the early 21st century. ==Works==