Michael A. Bellesiles

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Michael A. Bellesiles is a former professor of American colonial history at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. After writing the award-winning but immediately controversial book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000), Bellesiles was investigated by Emory University for possible "research misconduct." He resigned his professorship in October 2002, and the Bancroft Prize of Columbia University, earlier awarded the book, was rescinded.

Contents

[edit] Education and Academic Career

Bellesiles received his B.A. from the University of California-Santa Cruz in 1975 and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine in 1986. In 1993, Bellesiles published Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allan and the Struggle for Independence in the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia).

Bellesiles joined the Emory University faculty in 1988 and was promoted to full professor in 1999. He served as director of undergraduate studies in history, 1991-1998, and as director of Emory's Center for the Study of Violence. He also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1998-99 Bellesiles was a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Institute and spent 2001-02 as a Visiting Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

[edit] Arming America controversy

In 2000, Bellesiles published Arming America, The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which addresses the history of gun culture in America and argues that guns were less prevalent in the antebellum period of American history than has been commonly believed. Although the book was initially praised for its innovative use of probate records and was awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize of Columbia University, much of Bellesiles' research was later demonstrated to be inaccurate or even fraudulent, and the award was rescinded.[1]

Shortly after the publication of Arming America, several researchers, including Clayton Cramer and law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University (Ill.), suggested that the work included serious errors. In two scholarly articles, Lindgren reported[2][3] that Bellesiles had

  • purported to count guns in about a hundred wills from 17th- and 18th-century Providence, R.I. that had never existed because the decedents died intestate (i.e., without wills),
  • purported to count nineteenth century San Francisco County probate inventories that had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire,
  • reported a national mean for gun ownership in 18th-century probate inventories that was mathematically impossible,
  • misreported the condition of guns described in probate records in a way that accommodated his thesis,
  • mis-cited the counts of guns in nineteenth-century Massachusetts censuses and militia reports,
  • had more than a 60% error rate in finding guns in Vermont estates, and
  • had a 100% error rate in the cited gun-related homicide cases of seventeenth-century Plymouth.

Bellesiles misquoted sources or took quotes significantly out of context to support his theses. In one case, he quoted George Washington on the quality of the militias, and misrepresented Washington's statement about three poorly prepared militia units as applying to the militia in general, although Washington had noted that the three units were exceptions to the rule.[4] Bellesiles also modified texts of early gun laws to change their meanings. One investigator, Clayton Cramer, wrote, "It took me twelve hours of hunting before I found a citation that was completely correct. In the intervening two years, I have spent thousands of hours chasing down Bellesiles’s citations, and I have found many hundreds of shockingly gross falsifications."[5]

Lethal Imagination (1999)
Lethal Imagination (1999)

These scholarly concerns caused Emory University both to conduct an internal inquiry and appoint an external Investigative Committee. Both committees found serious flaws in Bellesiles's work, with the external committee questioning both its quality and veracity. During the investigation, Bellesiles refused to turn over his notes to investigators, offering the excuse that his notes had been destroyed in a flood.[6] Bellesiles publicly disputed the external Committee's findings in his 2002 statement, claiming he had followed all pertinent scholarly guidelines and corrected all errors of fact known to him. He said, "I have never fabricated evidence of any kind nor knowingly evaded my responsibilities as a scholar." On the day that the report was released, Bellesiles resigned from Emory.[7]

The trustees of Columbia University later rescinded Michael Bellesiles's Bancroft Prize. Alfred A. Knopf Press did not renew its contract with Bellesiles, although Soft Skull Press picked up Arming America and published a revised and amended version.

Garry Wills, who had enthusiastically reviewed Arming America for the New York Times, later said, "I was took. The book is a fraud." He also told an interviewer for C-SPAN that Bellesiles "claimed to have consulted archives he didn't and he misrepresented those archives," lamenting that Bellesiles did not have to do it, since he had good evidence for many of his claims. Wills added, "People get taken by very good con men." [8] Historian Roger Lane, who had reviewed the book positively for the Journal of American History, offered a similar opinion: "It is entirely clear to me that he's made up a lot of these records. He's betrayed us. He's betrayed the cause. It's 100 percent clear that the guy is a liar and a disgrace to my profession. He's breached that trust."[9]

Bellesiles's most public defender has been Jon Wiener, a historian at UC-Irvine, where Bellesiles received his Ph.D. Wiener states that Bellesiles's errors are no more numerous than those in many other books and that no fraud was involved. Wiener claims that, at worst, Bellesiles was sloppy in his use of the probate records.[10]

In 2003, Bellesiles published a defense of his work in connection with the re-publication of Arming America entitled "Weighed in an Even Balance."[11] arguing that roughly three-quarters of the book had not been challenged. [12]

Although in the United States, the political debate over guns and the militia continued to be part of an on-going debate over a citizen's right to bear arms, some felt that political differences ultimately mattered less to historians "than the possibility that Bellesiles might have engaged in faulty, fraudulent, and unethical research."[13]

[edit] References

  1. ^ History News Network
  2. ^ Lindgren, James; Heather, Justin Lee (2002). "Counting Guns in Early America" (abstract). William & Mary Law Review 43 (5): 1777. 
  3. ^ Lindgren, James (2002). "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal" (abstract). Yale Law Journal 111: 2195. doi:10.2307/797645. 
  4. ^ Cramer in National Review
  5. ^ History News Network
  6. ^ LeftWatch
  7. ^ Emory University announcement of Bellesiles' resignation
  8. ^ BookTV
  9. ^ History News Network
  10. ^ Jon Weiner, "Fire at Will", The Nation (October 17, 2002).
  11. ^ Michael Bellesiles, Weighed in an Even Balance (2003).
  12. ^ "Most of the criticisms of Arming America seem to focus on the American Revolutionary period. Very little has been said about the seventeenth or nineteenth centuries, roughly three-fourths of the book. For instance, I know of only one criticism of my handling of the War of 1812, none of the Mexican War and Civil War. There are whole areas of inquiry that have not been subject to criticism, though I know from the various e-mail lists that nearly every footnote in Arming America has been checked for accuracy. Almost nothing has been said about my portrayal of the attitudes of the political leadership, or the technological development of firearms, or government efforts to promote gun production and use, or the collapse of the militia in the nineteenth century, or the growth and nature of the hunting subculture and the revival of the militia in the mid-nineteenth century. Nor do I know of any criticisms of my examination of law and politics in the colonial period or the nineteenth century, or of the nature of crowd actions at any time. It is intriguing that most of the accusations against this book are concerned with probate records and the period immediately preceding the articulation of the Second Amendment."
  13. ^ Robert C. Williams, The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 117.

[edit] Further reading

  • Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect
  • James Lindgren, "Fall From Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal", Yale Law Journal (2002)
  • Ron Robin, Scandals & Scoundrels
  • Jon Wiener, Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower. (New York: The New Press, New 2005). ISBN 1565848845. A historian and defender of Bellesiles examines a dozen recent cases of "historians in trouble", including the Bellesiles case.
  • Clayton E. Cramer, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (Nashville, Nelson Current, 2007) ISBN 1595550690.

[edit] Bellesiles' Bibliography

  • Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook by Christopher Waldrep and Michael Bellesiles (2006)
  • The Second Amendment in Law and History: Historians and Constitutional Scholars on the Right to Bear Arms by Carl T. Bogus and Michael A. Bellesiles (2001)
  • Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture by Michael A. Bellesiles (2000; rev. ed. 2003)
  • Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History by Michael A. Bellesiles (1999)
  • Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier by Michael A. Bellesiles (1993, 1995)
  • Ethan Allen and his Kin: Correspondence, 1772-1819 (1998) (co-editor)
  • "Exploding the Myth of an Armed America," Chronicle of Higher Education's (Sept. 29, 2000).
  • "The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865," Journal of American History 425 (1996).

[edit] External links

Key events

Other events, commentary, etc.