Michael A. Bellesiles

Michael A. Bellesiles
Michael A. Bellesiles
Born Michael A. Bellesiles
Nationality USA
Occupation Scholar

Michael A. Bellesiles (pronounced "bah-LEEL")[1] 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 (Alfred A. Knopf, 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 The prize was rescinded in 2002 after an inquiry of distinguished historians found Bellesiles "guilty of unprofessional and misleading work."[2] Bellesiles responded that he had "never fabricated evidence of any kind nor knowingly evaded my responsibilities as a scholar,"[3] but he nonetheless resigned his Emory professorship the same year.[4]

Contents

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

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,[5] which Peter Charles Hoffer called "a stunning article on gun ownership in early America."[6] 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.[7] 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."[8] 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.[9]

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." [10] 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.” [11] 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.” [12]

Bellesiles energized this professional consensus by attempting to play “the professors against the NRA in a high-wire act of arrogant bravado.” [13] For instance, he replied to Heston’s criticism by telling the actor to earn a PhD before he criticized the work of scholars.[14] 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.” [15] 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.[16] 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.” [17]

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."[18] 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.[19] 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."[20]

In two scholarly articles,[21][22] 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.)[23] 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."[24]

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.[25] Bellesiles failed to provide investigators with his research notes, claiming the notes were destroyed in a flood.[26]

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."[2]

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.[27]

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.[28] 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.[29]

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."[30]

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,[31] 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."[32]

The historian Roger Lane, who had reviewed the book positively in the Journal of American History,[33] 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."[34] Historian Pauline Maier reflected that it seemed historians had "ceased to read carefully and critically, even in the awarding of book prizes."[35]

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."[36]

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.[37][38]

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.[39] After the truth of the story was questioned,[40][41] 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.[42]

In 2011, Michael Bellesiles was teaching at Central Connecticut State University.[43] In 2010 his book 1877: America's Year of Living with Violence was published by The New Press.[44] 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."[45]

Writings by Bellesiles

References

  1. ^ "How the Bellesiles Story Developed". Hnn.us. http://hnn.us/articles/691.html. Retrieved 2010-11-08. 
  2. ^ a b "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" (PDF). http://www.emory.edu/news/Releases//Final_Report.pdf. Retrieved 2010-11-08. 
  3. ^ "Michael Bellesiles statement, 2002" (PDF). http://www.emory.edu/news/Releases//B_statement.pdf. Retrieved 2010-11-08. 
  4. ^ "Bancroft Prize press release, 2002". Columbia.edu. 2002-12-16. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/02/12/bancroft_prize.html. Retrieved 2010-11-08. 
  5. ^ Michael Bellesiles, "The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865," Journal of American History 83 (September 1996), 425-55.
  6. ^ Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History (PublicAffairs, 2004), 145.
  7. ^ Hoffer, 146.
  8. ^ "Charlton Heston, letter to ''The New York Times'', October 1, 2000". Nytimes.com. 2000-10-01. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/01/books/l-arming-america-266906.html?pagewanted=1?pagewanted=1. Retrieved 2010-11-08. 
  9. ^ Review of Arming America, The Journal of American History (Sept. 2001): 614.
  10. ^ Clayton E. Cramer, "What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed," History News Network, January 6, 2003.
  11. ^ Hoffer, 158.
  12. ^ Hoffer, 161: “systematically dismantles one of our most cherished and dangerous national myths.”
  13. ^ Hoffer, 143.
  14. ^ Hoffer, 162.
  15. ^ Hoffer, 157-58. On February 16, 2000, Bellesiles had been a featured speaker at a symposium sponsored by the Brady Center. A link to the Brady Campaign Legal Action Project Second Amendment Symposium, February 16, 2000, was posted by the pro-gun control Potowmack Institute, among others; since then, the Brady Campaign has deleted all references to Michael Bellesiles and their own Second Amendment Symposium from their website.
  16. ^ Hoffer, 159-60.
  17. ^ Hoffer, 158-59.
  18. ^ 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
  19. ^ "The Bancroft and Bellesiles". Hnn.us. http://hnn.us/articles/1157.html. Retrieved 2010-11-08. 
  20. ^ Hoffer, 148.
  21. ^ Lindgren, James; Heather, Justin Lee (2002). "Counting Guns in Early America" (abstract). William & Mary Law Review 43 (5): 1777. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=692401. Retrieved 2008-03-11. 
  22. ^ Lindgren, James; Bellesiles, Michael A. (2002). "Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal" (PDF). Yale Law Journal (The Yale Law Journal Company, Inc.) 111 (8): 2195. doi:10.2307/797645. JSTOR 797645. http://www.yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal/content-pages/fall-from-grace:-arming-america-and-the-bellesiles-scandal/. Retrieved 2010-03-08. 
  23. ^ Clayton E. Cramer, "Shots in the Dark: Bellesiles Arming America is novel in both senses", National Review, 23 Sep 2000, accessed 30 Mar 2010
  24. ^ Clayton E. Cramer, "What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed", History News Network, 1-06-03, accessed 30 Mar 2010
  25. ^ Unlike the initial wave of criticism of Bellesiles, which came primarily from observers outside the discipline of history and often outside academe, professional historians conducted this investigation. The three historians were Stanley Katz of Princeton, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard, and Hanna Grey, emerita at the University of Chicago.
  26. ^ "Historian's Prizewinning Book on Guns is Embroiled in a Scandal", The New York Times, December 8, 2001. There was water damage to the building containing Bellesiles's office—as was reported in Emory University's daily paper—but critics disputed the plausibility of Bellesiles's claim that the problem explained his missing research records. The waterline break at Emory occurred in April 2000, after Arming America went to press. 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 version 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 Bellesile's notes; Jerome Sternstein, "'Pulped' Fiction: Michael Bellesiles and His Yellow Note Pads,", History News Network, May 20, 2002.
  27. ^ Hoffer, 166. Emory accepted Bellesiles' resignation effective December 31, 2002.
  28. ^ "Statement of NEH Chairman Bruce Cole on Newberry Library Fellowship Award (2002)". Neh.gov. 2002-05-21. http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/20020521.html. Retrieved 2010-11-08. 
  29. ^ Michael Bellesiles, "Weighed in an Even Balance", Soft Skull Press (2003)
  30. ^ Jon Weiner, "Emory's Bellesiles Report: A Case of Tunnel Vision," Perspectives, newsletter of the Organization of American Historians (2003). In defending Bellesiles, Weiner noted that the Bancroft Prize committee had not rescinded its award and that Garry Wills and Edmund Morgan had "refused demands that they withdraw or alter their published praise for the book."Jon Weiner, "Fire at Will", The Nation (October 17, 2002). Subsequently, the Bancroft Committee rescinded the award and both Wills and Morgan retracted their praise.
  31. ^ Garry Wills review in New York Times (Sept. 10, 2000)
  32. ^ Garry Wills Interview, BookTV, C-SPAN (Jan. 2, 2005)
  33. ^ Roger Lane, review of Arming America, Journal of American History (September 2001)
  34. ^ Sternstein, Jerome. "Quoted in article published at History News Network". Hnn.us. http://hnn.us/articles/1074.html. Retrieved 2010-11-08. 
  35. ^ quoted in Hoffer, 169-70.
  36. ^ Hoffer, 171.
  37. ^ Bruce E. Johansen, Silenced! Academic Freedom, Scientific Inquiry, and the First Amendment Under Siege in America (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2007; ISBN 978-0-275-99686-4)
  38. ^ Asked by a reporter in 2010 what he had been doing since 2002, Bellesiles wasn't "entirely forthcoming," saying only that he had done some teaching in England and had worked as a freelancer for a textbook company. Tom Bartlett, "Michael Bellesiles Takes Another Shot," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 3, 2010
  39. ^ Basken, Paul (2010-06-27). "''The Chronicle of Higher Education''". Chronicle.com. http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-Military-History-in-a/66023. Retrieved 2010-11-08. 
  40. ^ Cohen, Patricia (August 3, 2010). "Scholar Emerges From Doghouse". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/books/04bellisles.html. 
  41. ^ Jim Lindgren, "Serious Questions about the veracity of Michael Bellesiles's Latest Tale", The Volokh Conspiracy, 9 July 2010
  42. ^ Editorial endnote to Bellesiles article, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2010. Bellesiles said he regretted having unknowingly passed on a story that was inaccurate.
  43. ^ New Press blurb
  44. ^ History News Network news item, 2010.
  45. ^ Robert E. Weir review of 1877 in the Journal of American History 98, no. 1 (June 2011), 210-11.

Further reading

External links


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужно сделать НИР?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Clayton Cramer — Clayton E. Cramer is a historian, author, and software engineer. He played an important early role in documenting errors in the book Arming America by Michael A. Bellesiles, a book that was later proven to be based on fraudulent research. His… …   Wikipedia

  • Mark Pitcavage — is a historian and critic of far right wing groups and a player of the boardgame Advanced Squad Leader (ASL).[1][2][3] He works with the Anti Defamation League and was the creator of the now archived Militia Watchdog website. The site has been an …   Wikipedia

  • List of University of California, Irvine people — This page lists noted individuals associated with the University of California, Irvine. AlumniThe following are noted alumni and students of the University of California, Irvine. When the information is known and available, degree and year are… …   Wikipedia

  • List of University of California, Santa Cruz people — This page lists notable alumni and faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz; alumni may have attended without graduating.Notable alumniAcademia*William D. Adams – President of Colby College, Waterville, Maine *Alexander Gonzalez, PhD… …   Wikipedia

  • Vermont — /veuhr mont /, n. a state of the NE United States: a part of New England. 511,456; 9609 sq. mi. (24,885 sq. km). Cap.: Montpelier. Abbr.: VT (for use with zip code), Vt. * * * State (pop., 2000: 608,827), northeastern U.S. One of the New England… …   Universalium

  • Daniel Leavitt — William Michael Harnett, The Faithful Colt 1890, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Painting of an early American revolver Daniel Leavitt (1813–59) [1] was an early American inventor who with his partner Edwin Wesson patented the first… …   Wikipedia

  • 1877 — This article is about the year 1877. Millennium: 2nd millennium Centuries: 18th century – 19th century – 20th century Decades: 1840s  1850s  1860s  – 1870s –  1880s  189 …   Wikipedia

  • Central Connecticut State University — Established 1849 Type Public university Endowment …   Wikipedia

  • Ethan Allen — Statue von Ethan Allen im Vermont State House Ethan Allen (* 10. Januar 1738 in Litchfield, Connecticut; † 13. Februar 1789 in Burlington, Vermont) war ein US amerikanischer Freiheitskämpfer. Er kämpfte gegen die Niederlassungen der Provinz New… …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • République du Vermont — Vermont Republic en 1777 – 1791 …   Wikipédia en Français

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
… Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”