Michael A. Bellesiles

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Michael A. Bellesiles is a former professor of Colonial history at Emory University in Atlanta, GeorgiaUSA, where he served as director of undergraduate studies in history from 1991-1998, and a former Director of Emory's Center for the Study of Violence. He has 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. Bellesiles joined Emory in 1988, was promoted to full Professor in 1999 and taught there until his resignation in 2002. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine in 1986.

Bellesiles wrote the controversial book Arming America, The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which addresses the history of gun culture in America and posits that guns were not as prevalent throughout American history as commonly thought. Praised for its innovative use of probate materials as evidence, the book was awarded Columbia University's (N.Y.) Bancroft Prize, although this award was later rescinded on the grounds of scholarly misconduct.[1]

Bellesiles has published numerous articles in History Journals and Law journals. Some of his publications include the following

• 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)
• 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," an essay on children and violence featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education's new review section (Sept. 29, 2000).

Shortly after Arming America's release, several researchers, including law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University (Ill.), pointed to evidence suggesting a pattern of serious errors. In two scholarly articles, Lindgren reported that Bellesiles:

• counted guns in about a hundred Providence, R.I. wills that could not be located and may not have existed,
• cited as a source, San Francisco County probate inventories -- which would be impossible as the San Francisco records were destroyed in the famous 1906 earthquake,
• reported a national mean for gun ownership in 18th-century probate inventories that was mathematically impossible given Bellesiles' regional totals,
• had (under Lindgfren's interpretation of the same files) misreported the condition of guns described in probate records in a way that fit Bellesiles's thesis,
• mis-cited the counts of guns in Massachusetts censuses and/or militia reports,
• had over a 60% error rate in finding guns in one sample of Vermont estates, and
• had a 100% error rate in finding gun-related homicide cases in the Plymouth records Bellesiles cited.

These scholarly concerns caused Emory University to conduct both an internal inquiry and to appoint an external Investigative Committee. Both committees found serious flaws in Bellesiles's work, with the external committee questioning both its quality and veracity. 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.

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

Garry Wills, who had reviewed Arming America enthusiastically 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."[2] 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."[3]

Bellesiles' most public defender is Jon Wiener, a historian at UC-Irvine, where Bellesiles received his Ph.D. Wiener states that Bellesiles's errors are no more numerous than in many other books and that no fraud was involved.

The citation for Bellesiles' original article in the Journal of American History is Michael A. Bellesiles, The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865, Journal of American History 425 (1996).

James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern University School of Law, wrote a review of the book, titled "Fall From Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal," which first appeared in the Yale Law Journal 111 (June 2002), pp 2195-2249.

Bellesiles recently published a defense in connection with the re-publication of "Arming America" entitled "Weighed in an Even Balance." A link to this paper appears below. In a letter on the Soft Skull web site he includes the following note:

"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 threefourths 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."

[edit] External links

• Bellesiles' "Disarming the Critics", an early rebuttal via the Organization of American Historians
• Fall From Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal, Yale Law Journal (2002), the final version of this review may be downloaded via this SSRN page
• Counting Guns in Early America, Wm. & Mary Law Review (2002) article may be downloaded via this SSRN page
• Columbia University's press release stripping Bellesiles of the Bancroft Prize
• Clayton Cramer's original criticisms of Bellesiles' research
• Fire at Will by Jon Wiener Jon Wiener's account of the Arming America controversy published in The Nation.
• Historians in trouble : plagiarism, fraud, and politics in the ivory tower by Jon Wiener, New Press, New York, 2005. ISBN 1565848845 Examines a dozen recent cases of "historians in trouble", including the Bellesiles case.
• Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Michael Bellesiles ("Conclusions" are on p. 16-19)
• Emory University's press release announcing the resignation of Dr. Bellesiles.
• Bellesile's original response to the Emory report and resignation.
• Weighed in an Even Balance a 2005 paper by Bellesiles updating his defense of his work.
• Bowden Hall Drying Off Emory University's daily paper reports on the flood that Bellesiles claims ruined his research papers.
• Soft Skull Press where you can buy the new edition of "Arming America"
• Journal of American History The Origins of A Gun Culture a JSTOR source for Bellesiles' original article which did not include the mistaken San Francisco reference
• Could Bellesiles Problems Undermine Gun Control? This article argues that the use of Bellesiles book in judicial opinions may result in reversals.