Michael A. Bellesiles

Michael A. Bellesiles (pronounced "bah-LEEL") is a former professor of American colonial and legal history at Emory University best known as the author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000), a book that won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2001. The prize was rescinded in 2002 after an inquiry of distinguished historians found Bellesiles "guilty of unprofessional and misleading work." Bellesiles responded that he had "never fabricated evidence of any kind nor knowingly evaded my responsibilities as a scholar," but he nonetheless resigned his Emory professorship the same year.

Education and academic career

Bellesiles received his B.A. from the University of California-Santa Cruz in 1975 and his PhD from the University of California at Irvine in 1986. He joined the Emory University faculty in 1988 and was promoted to full professor in 1999. There he served as director of undergraduate studies in history, 1991–1998, and as director of Emory's Center for the Study of Violence.

Bellesiles also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1998-99, he was a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Institute, and during 2001-02, a Visiting Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Arming America controversy

Main article: Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture

Thesis

Bellesiles's Arming America argued that guns were less prevalent in antebellum America than is commonly believed. The book expanded on his earlier article in a 1996 issue of the Journal of American History, which Peter Charles Hoffer called "a stunning article on gun ownership in early America." The article asserted that neither the frontier experience nor the Revolutionary War had created widespread gun ownership, that American militias were poorly armed, and that few Americans maintained firearms until after the Civil War, when weapons were mass-produced in large quantities. The article won the 1996 Binkley-Stephenson award of the Organization of American Historians for the best article published that year in its journal. Similarly, the book Arming America garnered high praise in many early reviews.

Scrutiny

Because the book's thesis bore upon ongoing political controversies about gun control and the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, gun rights advocates immediately attacked the book. Actor Charlton Heston, then-president of the National Rifle Association, called the book's argument "ludicrous." Conversely, a review by Roger Lane in The Journal of American History noted that with research that was “meticulous and thorough,” Bellesiles had "attacked the central myth behind the National Rifle Association's interpretation of the Second Amendment," and Lane declared Bellesiles’s evidence so formidable that “if the subject were open to rational argument,” the debate would be over.

Clayton Cramer, a software engineer, gun enthusiast, and early critic of Bellesiles, later argued that the reason "why historians swallowed Arming America’s preposterous claims so readily is that it fit into their political worldview so well.... Arming America said things, and created a system of thought so comfortable for the vast majority of historians, that they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right." Historian Peter Charles Hoffer, himself an advocate of gun control, lent support to Cramer’s charge when, in a 2004 examination of the Bellesiles case, he noted that influential members of the historical profession had indeed “taken strong public stands on violence in our society and its relation to gun control.” For instance, the academics solicited for blurbs by Bellesiles’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf “were ecstatic in part because the book knocked the gun lobby.”

Bellesiles energized this professional consensus by attempting to play “the professors against the NRA in a high-wire act of arrogant bravado.” For instance, he replied to Heston’s criticism by telling the actor to earn a PhD before he criticized the work of scholars. He pointed out that Cramer was “a long time advocate of unrestricted gun ownership” while he himself was a simple scholar who had “certain obligations of accuracy that transcend current political benefit.” After Bellesiles claimed he had been flooded by hate mail, both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians endorsed a resolution condemning the alleged harassment. As Hoffer later wrote, Bellesiles was convinced that whether the entire profession agreed with “his stance on gun ownership (and I suspect most did), surely academic historians would not let their expertise be impugned by a rank and partisan amateur like Cramer.”

In the end, however, the politics of the issue mattered less to historians "than the possibility that Bellesiles might have engaged in faulty, fraudulent, and unethical research." As critics subjected the historical claims of the book to close scrutiny, they demonstrated that much of Bellesiles' research, particularly his handling of probate records, was inaccurate and possibly fraudulent. This criticism included noting several serious errors in the tables published in The Journal of American History article, namely, that they did not provide a total number of cases and gave percentages that "were clearly wrong."

In two scholarly articles, law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University noted that in Arming America, Bellesiles had

• purported to count guns in about a hundred wills from 17th- and 18th-century Providence, Rhode Island, but these did not exist because the decedents had died intestate (i.e., without wills);
• purported to count nineteenth-century San Francisco County probate inventories, but these 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;
• miscited the counts of guns in nineteenth-century Massachusetts censuses and militia reports,
• had more than a 60% error rate in finding guns listed as part of estates in Vermont records; and
• had a 100% error rate in the cited gun-related homicide cases of seventeenth-century Plymouth.

Critics also identified problems with Bellesiles's methods of citation. Cramer noted that Bellesiles had misrepresented a passage by George Washington about the quality of three poorly prepared militia units as if his criticism applied to the militia in general. (Washington had noted that the three units were exceptions to the rule.) 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."

Emory investigation and resignation

As criticism grew and charges of scholarly misconduct were made, Emory University conducted an internal inquiry into Bellesiles's integrity, appointing an independent investigative committee composed of three leading academic historians from outside Emory University. Bellesiles failed to provide investigators with his research notes, claiming the notes were destroyed in a flood.

The scholarly investigation confirmed that Bellesiles's work had serious flaws, calling into question both its quality and veracity. The external report on Bellesiles concluded that "every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed" and called his statements in self-defense "prolix, confusing, evasive, and occasionally contradictory." It concluded that "his scholarly integrity is seriously in question."

Bellesiles publicly disputed these findings. He claimed to have followed all of the standards of scholarship and to have corrected all errors of fact known to him. Nevertheless, with his "reputation in tatters," Bellesiles issued a statement on October 25, 2002, announcing that he would resign his position at Emory by year's end.

Aftermath of the scandal

In 2002, the trustees of Columbia University rescinded Arming America's Bancroft Prize, the first such action in the history of the prize. Bellesiles's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, did not renew his contract, and the National Endowment for the Humanities withdrew its name from a fellowship that the Newberry Library had granted Bellesiles. In 2003, Arming America was republished in a revised and amended edition by Soft Skull Press. Bellesiles continued to defend the book's credibility and thesis, arguing that roughly three-quarters of the original book remained unchallenged.

Bellesiles's most vocal defender has been Jon Wiener, a historian at UC Irvine, where Bellesiles received his PhD. Wiener argued in The Nation that Bellesiles's errors were no more numerous than those in many other books, that no fraud was committed, and that, at worst, Bellesiles had been sloppy in his use of the probate records. Weiner also criticized the findings of the scholarly investigative committee, saying that it was "marred by a kind of tunnel vision."

Other historians who initially admired Arming America ceased to defend Bellesiles. The nationally prominent historian Garry Wills, who had enthusiastically reviewed Arming America for the New York Times, later said, in a 2005 interview on C-SPAN, "I was took. The book is a fraud." Wills noted that Bellesiles "claimed to have consulted archives he didn't and he misrepresented those archives," although "he didn't have to do that," since "he had a lot of good, solid evidence." Wills added, "People get taken by very good con men."

The historian Roger Lane, who had reviewed the book positively in 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." Historian Pauline Maier reflected that it seemed historians had "ceased to read carefully and critically, even in the awarding of book prizes."

As Hoffer concluded, "Bellesiles's condemnation by Emory University, the trustees of the Bancroft Prizes, and Knopf provided the gun lobby with information to blast the entire history profession....Even though H-Law, the Omohundro Institute, the OAH, and the AHA rushed to his side and stated principled objections to the politicization of history, they hesitated to ask the equally important question of whether he had manipulated them and betrayed their trust."

Life after Arming America

For roughly five years, Bellesiles virtually disappeared from academia, writing only a few book reviews in scholarly journals. In 2006, with Christopher Waldrep, he co-edited Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook, which includes an article defending Bellesiles.

In 2010, Bellesiles published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education recounting his interactions with a student whose brother had been killed by a sniper in Iraq. After the truth of the story was questioned, notably by James Lindgren, who had earlier challenged the veracity of Arming America, the newspaper determined that the student had lied to Bellesiles and his teaching assistant.

In 2011, Bellesiles was teaching at Central Connecticut State University. In 2010 his book 1877: America's Year of Living Violently was published by The New Press. A review in the Journal of American History called the "old-fashioned narrative tone" of 1877 "so delightfully retro that it is almost cutting edge."

Writings by Bellesiles

• Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (1993)
• "The Origins of A Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865," Journal of American History 425 (1996).
• Editor, Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (1999)
• "Exploding the Myth of an Armed America", Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept. 29, 2000)
• "Disarming the Critics", Organization of American Historians Newsletter (2001)
• "The Second Amendment in Action," in Carl T. Bogus and Michael A. Bellesiles (editors), The Second Amendment in Law and History: Historians and Constitutional Scholars on the Right to Bear Arms, The New Press (2001), ISBN 978-1-56584-699-9.
• Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000; 2d ed., Soft Skull Press, 2003.
• Weighed in an Even Balance (2003)
• Editor, Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook (2006), with Christopher Waldrep
• "The Year 1877 Looks Awfully Familiar Today," History News Network (May 17, 2010)
• "Teaching Military History in a Time of War," The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 27, 2010)
• Bellesiles, Michael A. (2010). 1877: America's Year of Living Violently. New York: The New Press. p. 400. ISBN 978-1-59558-441-0. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Further reading

• Jack N. Rakove, Gloria L. Main, Ira D. Gruber, Randolph Roth, and Michael A. Bellesiles, "Forum: Historians and Guns," William & Mary Quarterly (Jan. 2002)
• James Lindgren, "Fall From Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal", Yale Law Journal (May 2002)
• James Lindgren and Justin Lee Heather, "Counting Guns in Early America," William & Mary Law Review (2002)
• Don Williams, "Could Bellesiles's Problems Undermine Gun Control?" History News Network (May 20, 2002)
• Jon Weiner, "Fire at Will,",The Nation (Nov. 4, 2002)
• Jerome Sternstein, "Shooting the Messenger: Jon Weiner on Arming America", History News Network (Oct. 28, 2002)
• Joyce Lee Malcolm, "Disarming History," Reason Magazine (March 2003)
• Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud--American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004): 141-171.
• Ron Robin, Scandals & Scoundrels: Seven Cases that Shook the Academy. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)
• Jon Wiener, Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower. (New York: The New Press, 2005). ISBN 1-56584-884-5.
• Clayton E. Cramer, "Why Footnotes Matter: Checking Arming America's Claims" Plagiary (2006)
• Clayton E. Cramer, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (Nashville, Nelson Current, 2007) ISBN 1-59555-069-0.
• Scott McLemee, "Amazing Disgrace," Inside Higher Ed (May 19, 2010)
• Tom Bartlett, "Michael Bellesiles Takes Another Shot," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 3, 2010.
• Patricia Cohen, "Scholar Emerges From Doghouse", New York Times, Books, 3 Aug 2010.

External links

• Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles (7/10/02)
• Bellesiles response to the Emory report and resignation statement. (2002)
• Emory University's press release announcing the resignation of Dr. Bellesiles (10/25/02)
• Columbia University's press release rescinding Bellesiles' Bancroft Prize (12/16/02)