Arming America#Aftermath of the scandal

The thesis of Arming America is that gun culture in the United States did not have roots in the colonial and early national period but arose during the 1850s and 1860s. The book argues that guns were uncommon during peacetime in the United States during the colonial, early national, and antebellum periods, that guns were seldom used then and that the average American's proficiency in use of firearms was poor. Bellesiles maintains that more widespread use and ownership of guns dated to the Civil War, a period of widespread advance in firearm manufacturing and a consequent reduction in price and improvement in accuracy.

The book garnered many enthusiastic professional reviews and won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2001. The book's thesis bore upon ongoing political controversies around gun control and the Second Amendment, and many gun rights advocates criticized it. Actor Charlton Heston, then-president of the National Rifle Association, described the book's argument as "ludicrous."{{cite news | url = https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/01/books/l-arming-america-266906.html | title = Letter to the New York Times | first = Charlton | last = Heston | author-link = Charlton Heston | date = October 1, 2000 | work=The New York Times | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150527125326/https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/01/books/l-arming-america-266906.html | archive-date = May 27, 2015 | url-status=live}}{{Subscription required|date=August 2023}}

Conversely, Roger Lane's review in the Journal of American History said that the book's research was “meticulous and thorough.” He wrote that Bellesiles had "attacked the central myth behind the National Rifle Association's interpretation of the Second Amendment." Lane declared Bellesiles’ evidence so formidable that "if the subject were open to rational argument," the debate would be over.{{cite journal |url =http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/content/88/2/614.full.pdf+html |archive-url=https://archive.today/20120721102805/http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/content/88/2/614.full.pdf+html |url-status=dead |archive-date=2012-07-21 | title=Review of Arming America |journal=The Journal of American History |date=September 2001 | pages = 614}} Peter S. Onuf called the book "a myth-busting tour-de-force."

Several apparent errors and distortions were first identified by Clayton Cramer, an amateur historian and gun enthusiast.{{Cite journal |last=Wilson |first=J |date=Jan 2002 |title=The Scandal of Arming America. (Stranger in a Strange Land) |url=https://www.christianitytoday.com/2002/01/stranger-in-strange-land-scandal-of-arming-america/ |journal=Books & Culture |volume=8 |issue=1 |pages=4–6}} Cramer, who had been skeptical of Bellesiles' thesis since reading his 1996 article, 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... they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right."{{cite web | first = Clayton E. | last = Cramer | author-link = Clayton Cramer | title = What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed | url = https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1185 | publisher = History News Network | date = January 6, 2003 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150128081850/https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1185 | archive-date=January 28, 2015 | url-status=live}} Historian Peter Charles Hoffer, 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 "taken strong public stands on violence in our society and its relation to gun control."{{cite book | first = Peter Charles | last = Hoffer | title = Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud—American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin | location = New York | publisher = PublicAffairs | year = 2004}} For instance, the academics solicited for blurbs by Bellesiles’ publisher Alfred A. Knopf "were ecstatic in part because the book knocked the gun lobby."Hoffer, 161: “systematically dismantles one of our most cherished and dangerous national myths.”

According to Hoffer, Bellesiles energized this professional consensus by attempting to play "the professors against the NRA in a high-wire act of arrogant bravado."Hoffer, 143. For instance, he replied to Heston’s criticism by telling the actor to earn a Ph.D. before criticizing the work of scholars.Hoffer, 162. He pointed out that Cramer was "a long time advocate of unrestricted gun ownership" while he was a scholar who had "certain obligations of accuracy that transcend current political benefit."Hoffer, 157-58. On February 16, 2000, Bellesiles had been a featured speaker at a symposium sponsored by the Brady Center to Prevent Handgun Violence. A [http://www.gunlawsuits.org/symposium.asp link] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20010420100736/http://www.gunlawsuits.org/symposium.asp|date=2001-04-20}} to the Brady Campaign Legal Action Project Second Amendment Symposium, February 16, 2000, was posted by the pro-gun control Potowmack Institute, among others. After Bellesiles said he had been flooded by hate mail, both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians endorsed a resolution condemning the harassment.Hoffer, 159-60. 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."Hoffer, 158-59.

In the end, according to Robert C Williams, the politics of the issue mattered less to historians "than the possibility that Bellesiles might have engaged in faulty, fraudulent, and unethical research."Robert C. Williams, [https://archive.org/details/historianstoolbo0000will/page/113 The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History] (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 113 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.[http://hnn.us/articles/1157.html History News Network] This criticism included noting several serious errors in the tables published in the book, as well as 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."Hoffer, 148.

In two scholarly articles,

{{cite journal |title=Counting Guns in Early America

|last=Lindgren |first=James |author-link=James Lindgren

|author2=Heather, Justin Lee

|journal=William & Mary Law Review

|year=2002 |volume=43 |issue=5 |pages=1777

|url=https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/73968560.pdf

|ssrn=268583

|format=abstract}}{{cite journal

|title=Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal

|last1=Lindgren |first1=James |author-link=James Lindgren

|journal=Yale Law Journal |volume=111 |pages=2195 |year=2002

|ssrn=692421

|last2=Bellesiles

|first2=Michael A.

|issue=8

|publisher=The Yale Law Journal Company, Inc. |doi=10.2307/797645|jstor=797645 |url=https://law.bepress.com/nwwps-lep/art9 }} 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; on this point, Bellesilles claimed he had actually consulted the more complete archives at nearby Contra Costa County, but the committee also disputed this claim
• 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, as for instance, claiming that in Providence records most guns were listed as old or broken when fewer than 10% were so listed;
• 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 Colony.

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.){{cite web|url=http://www.nationalreview.com/weekend/books/books-cramer092300.shtml|first=Clayton E.|last=Cramer|author-link=Clayton Cramer|title=Shots in the Dark|work=National Review|date=September 23, 2000|access-date=March 30, 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20001017143057/http://www.nationalreview.com/weekend/books/books-cramer092300.shtml|archive-date=October 17, 2000|url-status=dead}} 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."

As criticism increased 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.Unlike the initial wave of criticism, made primarily by non-academics or non-historians, professional historians conducted this investigation. The three historians were Stanley Katz of Princeton, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard, and Hanna Gray, emerita at the University of Chicago.{{citation needed|date=September 2019}} Bellesiles failed to provide investigators with his research notes, claiming the notes were destroyed in a flood.{{cite web|last=Worth|first=Robert F.|author-link=Robert F. Worth|url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2001/12/08/books/08GUNS.html|title=Historian's Prizewinning Book on Guns is Embroiled in a Scandal|work=The New York Times|date=December 8, 2001|access-date=September 20, 2019}}There was water damage to the building containing Bellesiles' office—as was reported in [http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/2000/May/ermay.8/5_8_00bowden.html Emory University's daily paper]—but critics disputed the plausibility of Bellesiles' claim that the problem explained his missing research records. The waterline break at Emory occurred in April 2000, after Arming America went to press.{{cite web|last=Mehegan|first=David|title=New doubts about gun historian|url=http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/254/nation/New_doubts_about_gun_historian+.shtml|work=The Boston Globe|date=September 11, 2001|access-date=September 20, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20010913152728/http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/254/nation/New_doubts_about_gun_historian+.shtml|archive-date=September 13, 2001|url-status=dead}}

In the initial hardcover edition of the book, Bellesiles did not give the total number of probate records which he had investigated, but the following year, after the flood, Bellesiles included in the paperback edition the claim that he had investigated 11,170 probate records. "By his own account," writes Hoffer, "the flood had destroyed all but a few loose papers of his data. It was a mystery how supposedly lost original data could reappear to enable him to add the number of cases to the 2001 paperback edition, then disappear once again when the committee of inquiry sought the data from him" (Hoffer, 153). One critic tried, unsuccessfully, to destroy penciled notes on yellow pads by submerging them in his bathtub, in order to prove that water damage would not have destroyed Bellesiles' notes.Jerome Sternstein, [http://hnn.us/articles/742.html "'Pulped' Fiction: Michael Bellesiles and His Yellow Note Pads,"], History News Network, May 20, 2002.

The scholarly investigation confirmed that Bellesiles' 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" and that he was in violation of the American Historical Association's standards of scholarly integrity.[http://www.emory.edu/news/Releases//Final_Report.pdf Stanley N. Katz, Hannah H. Gray, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles," July 10, 2002]{{Cite web|title=Amazing Disgrace {{!}} Inside Higher Ed|url=https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/05/19/amazing-disgrace|access-date=2021-09-06|website=www.insidehighered.com|language=en}}

Bellesiles disputed these findings, claiming to have followed all scholarly standards 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 the resignation of his professorship at Emory by year's end.Hoffer, 166. Emory accepted Bellesiles' resignation effective December 31, 2002. In 2010 he published his first book since the scandal, 1877: America's Year of Living Violently, with The New Press while working as adjunct professor at Central Connecticut State University. In 2012 Bellesiles was working as a bartender while continuing to write history.{{cite web|url=http://www.theday.com/article/20120917/NWS10/309209649 | title=Michael Bellesiles: Bartender, Writer, History Buff|author=Jen Matteis|access-date=March 1, 2017|date=September 17, 2012|work=The Day}}

In 2002, the trustees of Columbia University rescinded Arming America{{'}}s Bancroft Prize, the first such action in the history of the prize. Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of Arming America, did not renew Bellesiles' contract, and the National Endowment for the Humanities withdrew its name from a fellowship that the Newberry Library had granted Bellesiles.[https://web.archive.org/web/20020602135449/http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/20020521.html Statement of NEH Chairman Bruce Cole on Newberry Library Fellowship Award (2002)] 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.[http://www.softskull.com/files/weighed_even_balance.pdf Michael Bellesiles, "Weighed in an Even Balance"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081030002313/http://www.softskull.com/files/weighed_even_balance.pdf |date=2008-10-30 }}, Soft Skull Press (2003) In a 2019 podcast interview with Daniel Gullotta, Bellesiles blamed the controversy on his decision not to publish his book through a university press. He also disputed claims that he had written the book with a left-wing agenda, claiming he had identified as a Burkean conservative Republican trying to dispute the idea that gun violence was an inherent part of American culture and that white Americans in the 18th and early 19th centuries were “mass murderers" and "genocidal lunatics."{{Cite web|title=The historical profession's greatest modern scandal, two decades later|url=https://theweek.com/articles/865208/historical-professions-greatest-modern-scandal-two-decades-later|access-date=2021-09-05|website=The Week|date=18 September 2019 |language=en}}

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,[https://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/10/books/spiking-the-gun-myth.html?scp=1&sq=bellesiles+wills&st=nyt Garry Wills review in New York Times] (Sept. 10, 2000) 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."[http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/184749-1 Garry Wills Interview] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120313114250/http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/184749-1 |date=2012-03-13 }}, BookTV, C-SPAN (Jan. 2, 2005)

Historian Roger Lane, who had reviewed the book positively in the Journal of American History,[http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/88.2/br_2.html Roger Lane, review of Arming America, Journal of American History] (September 2001) 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."[http://hnn.us/articles/1074.html Quoted in article published at History News Network] Historian Pauline Maier reflected that it seemed historians had "ceased to read carefully and critically, even in the awarding of book prizes."quoted in Hoffer, 169-70.

However, some scholars and commentators continued to defend Bellesilles. Jon Wiener claimed in his book Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower that Bellesilles had been the victim of a politicized witch hunt.

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."Hoffer, 171.

• Confirmation bias
• Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud—American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin by Peter Charles Hoffer

{{Reflist|30em}}

• Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000) {{ISBN|0-375-70198-2}}
• [https://books.google.com/books?id=KEZcZiatCyQC Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture], 2d ed. (Brooklyn, New York: Soft Skull Press, 2003) {{ISBN|1-932360-07-7}}

• 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.
• {{cite web | url = http://www.emory.edu/news/Releases//Final_Report.pdf | title = Report of the Investigating Committee in the matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles | date = July 10, 2002 | publisher = Emory University}}
• {{cite press release | url = http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/02/12/bancroft_prize.html | title = Columbia's Board of Trustees Votes to Rescind the 2001 Bancroft Prize | publisher = Columbia University | date = December 16, 2002}}
• {{cite journal | ssrn = 692421 | author = Lindgren J | title = Fall From Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal | journal = Yale Law Journal | volume = 111 | issue = 8 | pages = 2195–2249 | year = 2002| doi = 10.2307/797645 | jstor = 797645 | url = https://law.bepress.com/nwwps-lep/art9 }}
• {{cite journal | ssrn = 268583 | author = Lindgren J, Heather JL | title = Counting Guns in Early America | journal = William & Mary Law Review | year = 2002}}
• {{cite book | url = http://www.softskull.com/files/weighed_even_balance.pdf | first = Michael A. | last = Bellesiles | title = Weighed in an Even Balance | location = Brooklyn | publisher = Soft Skull Press | year = 2003 | access-date = 2009-01-07 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20081030002313/http://www.softskull.com/files/weighed_even_balance.pdf | archive-date = 2008-10-30 | url-status = dead }}
• {{cite web | url = http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/why-footnotes-matter-checking-arming-americas-claims.pdf?c=plag;idno=5240451.0001.016 | format = PDF | first = Clayton E. | last = Cramer | author-link = Clayton Cramer | title = Why Footnotes Matter: Checking Arming America's Claims | work = Plagiary | year = 2006 }}
• {{cite book|last=Robin|first=Ron Thedore|title=Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases That Shook the Academy|url=https://archive.org/details/scandalsscoundre00ronr|url-access=registration|access-date=15 February 2013|date=2004-10-01|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=9780520938151}}

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Category:2000 non-fiction books

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