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December 8, 2001
Historian's Prizewinning Book on Guns Is Embroiled in a Scandal
By ROBERT F. WORTH
nly a year ago, Michael A. Bellesiles was well on his way to becoming
an academic superstar. He had just published a book with a startling
thesis: very few people owned working guns in colonial America.
Stepping into the ferocious national debate over guns and the meaning
of the Second Amendment, Mr. Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory
University in Atlanta, caused a sensation. Legal scholars said his
prize-winning book could influence federal court cases challenging
gun laws; gun-control advocates championed the research as proof that
America's gun culture is, as Mr. Bellesiles put it, "an invented
tradition"; angry gun owners saw it as an insidious attack, a
calculated effort to prove that the Constitution's framers could not
have intended the "right to bear arms" to apply to individuals if so
few people owned them.
Now many of Mr. Bellesiles's defenders have gone silent. Over the past year a number
of scholars who have examined his sources say he has seriously misused historical
records and possibly fabricated them. They say the out
come, when all the evidence is in, could be one of the worst academic scandals in
years.
Mr. Bellesiles (pronounced buh-LEEL) has denied that the errors in "Arming America:
The Origins of a National Gun Culture" are more serious than the ones found in any
lengthy and serious work of scholarship, and he has re
peatedly said the attacks against him are politically motivated. Mr. Bellesiles, who
owns five guns and likes to shoot skeet and target-shoot in his spare time, said he
never intended his book to become a cause célèbre fo
r gun control advocates. "When I saw that the flap copy said, 'This is the N.R.A.'s
worst nightmare,' I was horrified," he said. "I feel like I'm a historian who
accidentally stepped into a minefield."
Indeed, after the National Rifle Association alerted its members about the book, Mr.
Bellesiles said, he began receiving hate mail and threats by phone, e-mail, fax and
letter. He was forced to get an unlisted number and
to change his e-mail address, he said. Earlier this year, two American historical
societies passed special resolutions condemning the harassment.
Without doubt, Mr. Bellesiles's research would not have received such careful scrutiny
if he had not stepped into the politically and ideologically charged struggle over
guns. Yet the scholars who have documented serious
errors in Mr. Bellesiles's book — many of them gun-control advocates — do not appear
to have any sort of political agenda.
They were struck by his claim to have studied more than 11,000 probate records in 40
counties around the country. He found that between 1765 and 1790, only 14 percent of
estate inventories listed guns, and "over half (53
percent) of these guns were listed as broken or otherwise defective." Those claims are
featured prominently in the book and were cited in many positive reviews as the core
of its argument.
But those who tried to examine the research soon found that they could not, because
most of Mr. Bellesiles's records, he said, had been destroyed in a flood. The records
they could check showed an astonishing number of se
rious errors, almost all of them seemingly intended to support his thesis. In some
cases his numbers were off by a factor of two, three or more, said Randolph Roth, a
history professor at Ohio State University.
To use one example: in his book, Mr. Bellesiles writes that of 186 probate inventories
from Providence, R.I., recorded between 1680 and 1730, "all for property-owning adult
males," only 90 mention some form of gun, and mo
re than half the guns were "evaluated as old and of poor quality."
At least three scholars have independently examined the same archive and found that 17
of the estates in question were owned by women; that some estates lacked inventories,
and that of those that had them, a much higher p
ercentage than Mr. Bellesiles reported contained guns; and that only 9 percent of the
guns were evaluated as old and of poor quality.
"The number and scope of the errors in Bellesiles's work are extraordinary," Mr. Roth
said. They go well beyond the probate record data, he added, affecting Mr.
Bellesiles's interpretation of militia returns, literary doc
uments and many other sources.
Confronted with serious errors in his research, Mr. Bellesiles has acknowledged that
there are problems with the way he used probate record data, and he even made some
changes in the paperback edition that came out earlie
r this year. But he said that the data were only a small part of the book. "I wish I
had taken them out entirely," he said.
Jack Rakove, a Stanford University historian who has been supportive of "Arming
America," agreed: "The book raises a host of interesting questions about the role
firearms have played in American life and culture, and it g
oes well beyond the probate data."
But Mr. Rakove conceded that he had not looked at the research that has been
questioned, and he said it was important that Mr. Bellesiles respond to his critics
more fully than he has so far.
Mr. Bellesiles's failure to explain himself has led to the most serious accusations
against him, which were outlined in The Boston Globe this fall. Earlier this year,
when the criticism of his book became more intense, he
asked Mr. Roth to help him defend himself. Mr. Roth wrote back, saying that if Mr.
Bellesiles would tell him what records he looked at in Vermont, he would go to the
archive on his own time, and that if the records match
ed, he would defend him. Mr. Bellesiles never responded to that offer, Mr. Roth said.
Those who have pressed him hardest for details say they have been led on a bizarre
scholarly car chase, with Mr. Bellesiles offering new memories about where he got his
records as soon as the old ones were discredited.
He has said from the start that he took notes on the thousands of colonial-era probate
records with tick marks in pencil on yellow legal pads. That fact alone was surprising
to many of his fellow historians, who tend to u
se a database when working with such large amounts of information.
Almost all of those notebooks were destroyed when his office at Emory was flooded in
May 2000, Mr. Bellesiles said.
James Lindgren, a professor at Northwestern University Law School and by far the most
thorough of Mr. Bellesiles's critics, asked him last year where he had done his
research on probate records. Mr. Bellesiles responded w
ith a number of locations, including the San Francisco Superior Court, where he said
he had found probate records from the 1850's.
Mr. Lindgren, who has done extensive work in probate data, called the courthouse and
was told that all the records for that decade were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake
and fire. They were not available in two other Bay A
rea libraries, either. Mr. Bellesiles now says he must have done the research
somewhere else and cannot remember where.
But Kathy Beals, former director of the California Genealogical Society, who has
worked extensively with probate records from that era, said: "Nobody knows of those
records being in existence, and if they are, there are h
undreds of people who would like to look at them."
In September, Mr. Bellesiles offered a new defense. Mr. Lindgren and a reporter from
The Globe, David Mehegan, found additional serious errors on Mr. Bellesiles's Web
site, where he had been posting probate records in an
attempt to replace what he said had been lost in the flood. He conceded the errors and
responded to The Globe, and later said someone had altered his Web site, presumably a
computer hacker.
But several scholars, including one of Mr. Bellesiles's colleagues at Emory, said they
doubted that story. Robert A. Paul, the interim dean at Emory College, said, "I can
neither independently confirm nor deny that Profes
sor Bellesiles's Web site was hacked."
In September, James Melton, the chairman of the Emory history department, asked Mr.
Bellesiles to write a "reasoned, measured, detailed, point by point response to your
critics" in an appropriate professional forum. Mr. B
ellesiles did publish a response in the November issue of the Organization of American
Historians newsletter, but it focused on harassment rather than charges of serious
misconduct.
Mr. Bellesiles's supporters have said they expect a fuller response to emerge in a
special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly to be published next month.. A draft
of the lengthy response Mr. Bellesiles wrote for that
issue, supplied by the journal's editor, concedes some mistakes and challenges
others, but leaves many serious errors unaddressed.
It is not clear what will happen to Mr. Bellesiles or his book if the scholarly
community reaches a consensus that "Arming America" is a seriously flawed or even
fraudulent book. The Emory College dean, Mr. Paul, said, "I
f there were scholarly fraud, we would take that very seriously."
Alan Brinkley, the chairman of the history department at Columbia
University, said similar questions had never been raised about a book
that had won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History and
Diplomacy. Although there has been no discussion of disciplining Mr.
Belles iles or revoking the prize, a spokesman for Jonathan R. Cole,
the provost and dean of faculties at Columbia University, said he had
distributed copies of the documents detailing Mr. Bellesiles's
mistakes to this year's three Bancroft jurors and asked them to
examine it.
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