Almost 600 historians and academics—including 18 Harvard professors—have signed a petition protesting the public television station C-SPAN’s plan to broadcast a lecture by historian and accused Holocaust denier David Irving.

The controversy stemmed from C-SPAN’s initial decision to air Irving’s talk immediately after a lecture by Emory University Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies Deborah E. Lipstadt.

She had also been scheduled to appear on the station’s “Book TV” program to discuss her forthcoming book, “History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving.” It recounts the libel lawsuit Irving filed against her in a British court for labeling him a Holocaust denier in her 1993 book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.” He lost the lawsuit in 2000.

On Sunday, “Book TV” featured a discussion with Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid about the book and the trial and showed assorted clips of Lipstadt and Irving. No lectures were aired, and Lipstadt said that to the best of her knowledge, none will.

Lipstadt had refused to appear on C-SPAN upon learning of the planned broadcast time of Irving’s lecture.

“What they wanted to do was to set me up, to force me into a debate,” Lipstadt said. “There is nothing to debate.”

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies then organized a petition urging the station to show only Lipstadt’s lecture and circulated the petition among academics.

“Within forty-eight hours, we had more than two hundred scholars on the petition,” said Wyman Institute Director Rafael Medoff.

The petition attracted 570 signatures.

“Clearly, this had an impact on C-SPAN,” Medoff said after the Sunday program aired. “The program that they broadcast was a clear demonstration that they realized they had made a mistake,” he said.

The level of interest in this issue was thrust into high gear by the involvement of Irving, who is a particularly controversial figure.

In his books and during the trial, Irving has claimed, for example, that gas chambers were not used at Auschwitz and that the atrocities against the Jews were not mainly directed by Adolf Hitler.

High Court Judge Charles Gray, who presided over the libel case, wrote in his decision that Irving had “persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence...is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.”

“That says it all about the quality of his so-called scholarly merit,” said Medoff, referring to Gray’s comments.

“Over the years, Irving has proved himself a resourceful researcher (his neo-Nazi contacts in Germany have helped), but his work has been tendentious and transgressed every rule that historians are supposed to follow,” Coolidge Professor of History David G. Blackbourn, who signed the petition, wrote in an e-mail.