Joseph Judge (February 4, 1928—April 20, 1996) was a writer and editor for National Geographic magazine, retiring as Senior Associate Editor in 1990 after 25 years of service.
Judge was born in Washington, D.C. His parents were Joe Judge, the baseball player, and Alma Gauvreau Judge. He attended Gonzaga College High School and then The Catholic University of America, graduating in 1950. He served in the United States Army and subsequently worked for Life magazine in New York. [1] He married Phyllis Mitchell of Scituate, Massachusetts in 1956.
Judge returned to Washington to work as a special assistant at the United States Department of Labor, working in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.
As a writer for National Geographic, Judge wrote articles on Monticello (Thomas Jefferson's home); Williamsburg; Washington, D.C.; Boston, Massachusetts; New Orleans, Louisiana; Florence, Italy; South Africa; Australia and many other places.
During his tenure as Senior Associate Editor (1985–1990), Judge was noted for taking on controversial topics, including disputes about the discovery of America and the discovery of the North Pole. Under his leadership, the magazine also made efforts to attract a younger and more urbanized audience. Judge was ousted from National Geographic in April 1990 (along with many other members of the editorial staff, including editor Wilbur E. Garrett) as Gilbert M. Grosvenor, grandson of one of the Society's founders, took personal charge of the magazine.
In November 1986, after five years of research, Judge wrote and published Columbus's First Landfall in the New World which advocated Samana Cay in the Bahamas as the true location of Guanahani, the first island seen by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to America. (This idea had first been proposed by Gustavus Fox in 1882). Prior to that time, official National Geographic Society maps had shown San Salvador Island as the first landfall. While Judge's theory attracted some support, and drew attention to the many shortcomings of San Salvador, the issue remains unsettled.
In 1983, CBS television had aired "The Race to the Pole," a docudrama about Dr. Frederick Cook and his alleged trip to the North Pole in 1908—a claim that was widely discredited at the time, but treated approvingly by CBS. Shortly afterward, the family of Robert E. Peary, Cook's rival, appealed to the National Geographic Society for help in restoring Peary's reputation. Significantly, the family offered to open Peary's personal papers, which contained many items unseen by historians, to help settle the issue. Judge hired noted polar explorer Wally Herbert to review the evidence. When Herbert's evaluation appeared—significantly placed in the Magazine's 100th anniversary issue of September 1988—he concluded that although Peary came close to the Pole, he did not actually reach it. Herbert's view is today shared by many polar historians.
But the magazine quickly backtracked from Herbert's position, apparently under pressure. Within months, National Geographic Society had hired another group of experts, the Navigation Foundation under the leadership of Adm. William Davies, to make yet another review of the evidence. In January 1990, the magazine published Davies' findings, based on analysis of shadows seen on photographs taken by Peary in 1909. Davies' analysis vindicated Peary, and the official stamp of approval on the National Geographic's reversal of position was given by no less than the Society's president Gilbert M. Grosvenor, in a signed letter appearing in the pages of the magazine. This incident could not have been beneficial for the editorial staff; Judge and a dozen other senior staffers were let go from National Geographic magazine on April 17, 1990 after what was officially described as several months of dispute over editorial content.
Following his retirement from National Geographic, Judge was the author of Season of Fire: The Confederate Strike on Washington (Rockbridge, 1994), about the exploits of Gen. Jubal A. Early, who twice led his troops to the capital gates in 1864. He also authored a book of poetry about life in Alaska called Toughing it Out. Judge remained interested in the Columbus landfall problem until the end of his life. His papers concerning this topic were donated to the Mariners' Museum in Virginia.
His son, Mark Judge, also became a journalist, and wrote a book called God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling , [2] describing how his father's Catholicism helped him regain his faith later in life. Another son, Joseph Mitchell Judge, is curator of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum.
The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole, Terrestrial North Pole or 90th Parallel North, is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. It is called the True North Pole to distinguish from the Magnetic North Pole.
Robert Edwin Peary Sr. was an American explorer and officer in the United States Navy who made several expeditions to the Arctic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was long credited as being the discoverer of the geographic North Pole in April 1909, having led the first expedition to have claimed this achievement, although it is now considered unlikely that he actually reached the Pole.

National Geographic is an American monthly magazine published by National Geographic Partners. The magazine was founded in 1888 as a scholarly journal, nine months after the establishment of the society, but is now a popular magazine. In 1905, it began including pictures, a style for which it became well-known. Its first color photos appeared in the 1910s. During the Cold War, the magazine committed itself to present a balanced view of the physical and human geography of countries beyond the Iron Curtain. Later, the magazine became outspoken on environmental issues.
Matthew Alexander Henson was an African American explorer who accompanied Robert Peary on seven voyages to the Arctic over a period of nearly 23 years. They spent a total of 18 years on expeditions together. He is best known for his participation in the 1908–1909 expedition that claimed to have reached the geographic North Pole on April 6, 1909. Henson said he was the first of their party to reach the North Pole.
Frederick Albert Cook was an American explorer, physician and ethnographer, who is most known for allegedly being the first to reach the North Pole on April 21, 1908. A competing claim was made a year later by Robert Peary, though both men's accounts have since been fiercely disputed; in December 1909, after reviewing Cook's limited records, a commission of the University of Copenhagen ruled his claim unproven. Nonetheless, in 1911, Cook published a memoir of the expedition in which he maintained the veracity of his assertions. In addition, he also claimed to have been the first person to reach the summit of Denali, the highest mountain in North America, a claim which has since been similarly discredited. Though he may not have achieved either Denali or the North Pole, his was the first and only expedition where a United States national discovered an Arctic island, Meighen Island.
Ralph Summers Plaisted was an American explorer who, with his three companions, Walt Pederson, Gerry Pitzl and Jean-Luc Bombardier, are regarded by most polar authorities to be the first to succeed in a surface traverse across the ice to the North Pole on April 19, 1968, making the first confirmed surface conquest of the Pole.

Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, was the first full-time editor of the National Geographic magazine (1899–1954). Grosvenor is credited with having consolidated the nascent magazine.

Sir Walter William Herbert was a British polar explorer, writer and artist. In 1969 he became the first man fully recognized for walking to the North Pole, on the 60th anniversary of Robert Peary's disputed expedition. He was described by Sir Ranulph Fiennes as "the greatest polar explorer of our time".
Georgetown Preparatory School is a Jesuit college-preparatory school in North Bethesda, Maryland for boys in ninth through twelfth grade. It has a 93-acre campus. It is the only Jesuit boarding school in the United States.
Luis Marden was an American photographer, explorer, writer, filmmaker, diver, navigator, and linguist who worked for National Geographic Magazine. He worked as a photographer and reporter before serving as chief of the National Geographic foreign editorial staff. He was a pioneer in the use of color photography, both on land and underwater, and also made many discoveries in the world of science.
Melville Bell Grosvenor was the president of the National Geographic Society and editor of The National Geographic Magazine from 1957 to 1967. He was the grandson of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell.
Dennis Rawlins is an American astronomer and historian who has acquired the reputation of skeptic primarily with respect to historical claims connected to astronomical considerations. He is known to the public mostly from media coverage of his investigations into two early twentieth-century North Pole expeditions. In his first book, Peary at the North Pole: fact or fiction? (1973), Rawlins argued that Robert Peary never made it to the North Pole in 1909. His second book (1993) is an edition of Tycho Brahe's 1598 catalogue of 1004 stars which detected ten star places that were fabricated, partially or entirely. In 1976, as the only astronomer on the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, he looked into the purported Mars effect. In 1996 he made headlines when page one of the New York Times covered his report to Ohio State University which concluded that in 1926 Richard E. Byrd's airplane flight towards the North Pole turned back 150 miles from the pole. Rawlins's third book, his detailed report on Byrd's trip and on the competence of lingering defenses of it, was co-published simultaneously in 2000 by DIO volume 10, 2000 and by the polar research center at the University of Cambridge. Because explorer Frederick Cook's story of reaching the North Pole in 1908 is generally rejected, the elimination of Peary and Byrd leaves fourth North Pole claimant Roald Amundsen as first there in 1926 in the airship Norge. Having attained the South Pole in 1911, Amundsen thus became the first to reach each geographical pole of the earth, as proposed in Rawlins's 1973 book.
Tom Avery, FRGS is a British explorer, author and motivational speaker. He made record-breaking journeys to the South Pole in 2002 and to the North Pole in 2005. He is one of fewer than ten people throughout history to have completed the Polar Trilogy; full length expeditions to the South Pole and North Pole and a coast to coast crossing of Greenland. Avery and his teammates hold two Guinness World Records; the fastest surface journey to the North Pole and the fastest coast-to-coast crossing of Greenland. He is also the youngest Briton to have reached both the North and South Poles on foot.

Robert Stein was a German-American translator, interpreter of Eskimo–Aleut languages, and amateur Arctic explorer whose contributions in the field of Arctic research were largely ineffectual.
The Peary Arctic Club was an American-based club with the goal of promoting the Arctic expeditions of Robert Peary (1856–1920).
Mark Gauvreau Judge is an American author and journalist known for books about his suburban Washington, D.C. youth, recovery from alcoholism, and the role of music in American popular culture.

God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling is a 2005 memoir about Catholic school, alcoholism, binge drinking, and hookup culture at Georgetown Preparatory School, written by Mark Gauvreau Judge. The name of the book is a reference to conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr.'s 1951 college memoir God and Man at Yale. Judge had previously written a 1997 memoir about the same institution, Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk. He would go on to publish a third book about Catholicism in 2010, A Tremor of Bliss.

A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll is a non-fiction book about sexual morality, Catholicism and religion in the United States written by Mark Judge. Prior to research on the work, Judge's background in Catholicism included education at Catholic schools Georgetown Preparatory School and Catholic University of America. Judge's previous books, including Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk and God and Man at Georgetown Prep chronicled his time at Catholic school.

Damn Senators: My Grandfather and the Story of Washington's Only World Series Championship is a biography by author Mark Gauvreau Judge about his grandfather, Major League Baseball player Joe Judge, and the Washington Senators. The book focuses on baseball players Judge and Walter Johnson, detailing how they took the Washington Senators to win the 1924 World Series.

Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk is a 1997 memoir about alcoholism, binge drinking, and hookup culture at Georgetown Preparatory School, written by Mark Judge. Judge recounts his early formative experiences growing up in suburbs of Washington, D.C. under Catholic school education. The author describes his secondary education at Georgetown Preparatory School as filled with heavy drinking and experiences of teenage alcoholism. The book criticizes Alcoholics Anonymous for its lack of acknowledgement of physiological causes of alcoholism as a disease process.