Michael Bellesiles

Michael Bellesiles is the author of Arming America: Origins of a National Gun Culture, a book which "ignited passions on both sides of the gun control debate" with its central argument: that guns were uncommon in early America and were of little use.

The Bancroft Prize and Its Revocation

Arming America was released in September 2000. When scholars began finding what they said were an extraordinary number of errors, some scholars outside universities attacked Prof. Bellesiles's honesty, accusing him of fraud for an altered statutory quotation. Prof. Bellesiles responded in print, calling his critics stalkers and likening them to holocaust deniers.

Columbia University awarded Prof. Bellesiles the prestigious Bancroft Prize in April 2001. Yet by September 2001 it was revealed that Bellesiles had claimed to have counted guns in San Francisco county records that were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. When in a prize-winning article that month, the Boston Globe also exposed that Bellesiles had phony data on his website, Emory University (where Bellesiles was a professor of history) began an internal ethical investigation. Bellesiles claimed that someone had hacked his website--removing data that undercut the book's thesis and replacing it with phony data that supported the thesis--but few scholars believed him. Ultimately, Emory's investigation (which easily should have been able to find any hacking if it occurred) cast doubt on Bellesiles' hacking claim. In December 2001 the New York Times reported that Bellesiles had frequently changed his story about the location of the records he claims to have read.

Then in February 2002, the William & Mary Quarterly published a symposium on the book, where several expert historians cast doubt on the substance of the book and one questioned whether Bellesiles visited the archives he claimed to have visited. Bellesiles responded admitting some errors, but claiming that his work was basically sound.

When Emory's internal investigation also went against Bellesiles, Emory hired an outside panel of three eminent historians. Their investigation concluded that Bellesiles had violated several ethical requirements for historians and was "guilty of unprofessional and misleading work." He resigned from Emory in October 2002.

In December 2002, after consulting the original committee members who had awarded the Bancroft Prize, Columbia University trustees then took the unprecedented step of rescinding the Bancroft Prize for "violating basic norms of acceptable scholarly conduct". [1] (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/02/12/bancroft_prize.html)

In January 2003, Knopf Press then withdrew the book from publication, finding Bellesiles's suggested revisions inadequate.

Bellesiles defends his book

Through it all, Bellesiles has maintained that his work is sound. He said he plans to continue his fight to vindicate his theory about guns.

Bellesiles said he is a victim of intellectual lynching and that his book was drawn into America's heated debate over gun control.

Soft Skull Press has published a new version of the book that corrects a few of the mistakes, but retains most of the errors that other scholars claimed to identify in their published critiques of the book.

In the fall of 2004, new books by Prof. Ron Robin and by Prof. Peter Hoffer gave accounts of the affair that found Bellesiles guilty of fabrication.

External Links

• CounterPunch's Article on Bellesiles (http://www.counterpunch.org/yellownote.html)
• ISBN 0375701982
• Second edition: ISBN 1932360077
• The Final Report of the Investigating Committee  (http://www.emory.edu/central/NEWS/Releases/Final_Report.pdf)
• Columbia's Board of Trustees Votes to Rescind the 2001 Bancroft Prize (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/02/12/bancroft_prize.html)
• How the Bellesiles Story Developed (http://hnn.us/articles/691.html) -- History News Network
• Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal (http://www.law.nwu.edu/faculty/fulltime/Lindgren/LindgrenFINAL.pdf) -- James Lindgren, Yale Law Journal, April 26, 2002
• Text, Lies, and Scholarship (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cpu/cpu_Review/plagiarists.html)
• Inequitable Penalties? The Tales of Two Gun Researchers (http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/features/reader/0,2061,566717,00.html) -- Join Together, September 11, 2003
• Gun Book Author Defends Research (http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/summaries/reader/0,2061,555543,00.html) -- Join Together, November 25, 2002
• Soft Skull Press to Reissue Controversial History Book Revised Edition of Michael Bellesiles' Arming America (http://www.jointogether.org/gv/news/alerts/reader/0,2061,556656,00.html) -- Join Together, 2/14/2003