Image of an unemployed fraud.
FORMER Professor Michael Bellesiles
"Jerome Sternstein, professor emeritus of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, said the committee essentially called Bellesiles a liar.
Posted on 11/03/2002 11:40:46 PM PST by Swordmaker
Professor of History Michael Bellesiles resigned from the University Friday, bringing an end to an unprecedented eight-month investigation into an Emory professor's research.
The resignation was announced along with a damning report from an outside investigative committee charged with evaluating Bellesiles' scholarship.
Bellesiles is the author of Arming America: Origins of a National Gun Culture, which challenges the long-held belief that early Americans depended heavily on guns. Bellesiles argues that guns were more rare in early America than previously thought, basing his claim on thousands of probate records, militia role lists and other evidence.
The 2000 book was initially received praise, especially for Bellesiles' use of probate records, and was awarded the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University (N.Y.) in April 2001. But since its publication, many scholars have said the book is riddled with errors and factual distortions.
Citing a "hostile environment," Bellesiles said in a statement that he could no longer continue to work at Emory but would continue to research probate materials and write a second book on gun culture from outside the University.
Bellesiles, who is on paid leave for the semester, could not be reached for this story as of press time Sunday. In his statement, he wrote that he stood by the results of his research.
"It seems to me that raising uncertainties that question the credibility of an entire book, without considering the book as a whole, is just plain unfair," Bellesiles wrote.
Interim Dean of the College Robert Paul said the University had fulfilled its obligations and now considers the investigation, which began with an internal inquiry in February, complete and closed.
Paul said the committee was charged with evaluating five specific aspects of alleged research misconduct, in order to keep the committee focused on academic issues in a controversy that some say has been fueled largely by gun politics.
"I would like to state to the world at large that this panel was asked to answer questions that had specifically to do with questions of research misconduct, not with either error or poor research quality," Paul said. "And that given that, this report in no way addresses the question of the validity of the overall theses in the book which still remain to be settled by scholarly debate."
Three distinguished academics ran the committee: Stanley Katz, a professor at Princeton University (N.J.), who served as chair; Hanna Gray, former president of the University of Chicago; and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Harvard University (Mass.).
"[T]he best that can be said of [Bellesiles'] work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work," the committee wrote in the 40-page official report. "Every aspect of his work in probate records is deeply flawed."
The committee chastised Bellesiles for not releasing exactly which materials he worked with and how he worked with them. A repeated concern revolved around Table One from the appendix of his book, which lists the percentage of probate inventories listing firearms over six time periods.
Scholars who study probate have called Bellesiles' statistics in Table One mathematically impossible. Bellesiles admitted in his statement that no scholar has been able to replicate the low number of gun ownership he claims in that table.
The committee was most critical of Bellesiles' inconsistent claims to have constructed Table One using probate inventories cited in a study by Alice Hanson Jones, another researcher. Jones studied the British colonies in North America and reported a large number of guns in early America between 1765 and 1850.
In an essay that appeared in the Journal of American History in 1996, about four years before Arming America was published, Bellesiles wrote that he "integrated" the Jones compilations into his own research on gun culture.
But when Bellesiles' research was later published as a full-length book, critics expressed concern as Bellesiles cited a much lower number of guns than Jones.
Bellesiles first accounted for the difference by explaining in an April 2001 letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal that he had actually not used the Jones' data, specifically omitting data from the part of the American Revolutionary War. During those years the government was handing out guns to citizens and largely increasing the number of available firearms, Bellesiles explained.
"I thought [it] would bias the listing for guns," Bellesiles told the committee.
The committee described Bellesiles' handling of the issue the most "egregious misrepresentation" in his research.
"If Professor Bellesiles silently excluded data from the years 1774-1776, as he asserts, precisely because they failed to show low number of guns, he has willingly misrepresented the evidence," the report read.
Michael Zuckerman, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, downplayed the results of the report. Zuckerman said Emory framed the charges of the committee so "unbelievably" narrow that he would not have served on the committee if asked.
"Emory's losing an immensely talented historian," Zuckerman said. "He's got a million other pieces of his argument that don't remotely touch on inventories."
But the majority of professors contacted for this story supported the committee's findings.
Harvey Klehr, Emory's Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history, said he thought the committee's report was "devastating," and that the University had acted responsibly in investigating allegations of research misconduct on Bellesiles' part.
Jerome Sternstein, professor emeritus of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, said the committee essentially called Bellesiles a liar.
Sternstein said he thought Bellesiles was pushed to resign from the University.
"Nobody resigns a tenured spot, in my 40 years of teaching, without having another appointment or another job available unless they're filthy rich," Sternstein said. "So he was forced out."
Paul said he could not discuss the conditions of Bellesiles' resignation or rumors of a possible monetary settlement with the history professor.
Clayton Cramer, an amateur historian and an outspoken critic of Bellesiles, said he was happy Emory had acted to address "historical lies" in Bellesiles book. But Cramer said he was a little disappointed the committee did not pursue "the much larger and much more obvious" examples of intentional fraud that he said existed in Arming America.
Limiting the investigation to probate records, Cramer said, avoided issues with other documents. Cramer said Bellesiles cites 80 travel accounts to show that visitors to America did not encounter much violence or widespread gun usage.
But Cramer said he read 12 of those accounts and found the exact opposite: The authors of the cited accounts reported being surrounded by guns and violence.
"I can tell you that if you open a box of chocolate and twelve of the first chocolates you pick out have maggots in them, you don't need to check the rest of the box," Cramer said. "Bellesiles did not read those travel accounts."
A spokesperson for the Bancroft Prize committee and a representative of Alfred A. Knopf Press, which published Arming America, could not be reached for comment.
Image of an unemployed fraud.
FORMER Professor Michael Bellesiles
"Jerome Sternstein, professor emeritus of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, said the committee essentially called Bellesiles a liar.
And what about Garry Wills and Edmund Morgan, considered by Wiener to be two of America's "top historians." Wiener makes much of the fact that neither of them has publicly retracted their glowing reviews of Arming America, though, he says, they have been under pressure to do so. He doesn't say whether he interviewed them for his article. But it is safe to say he didn't -- and it's probably a good thing too. One can only imagine how Wiener would have responded to Garry Wills, who, when asked last spring to appear on a panel to speak in favor of Bellesiles, emailed his refusal back with the blunt message, "nobody defends him." And last April, when asked by a colleague at Northwestern what he presently thought of Arming America, Wills replied: "I was took. The book is a fraud." As for Morgan, he, too, might have upset Wiener. Recently, on his own volition, Morgan sent a highly complimentary letter to one of Bellesiles's leading critics, praising both the substance and the tone of his work, concluding that the critic was right and Bellesiles was wrong.
But the following citation from the same source shows that some of the reviewers are STILL IN DENIAL!
The Federal Lawyer has become the first periodical to repudiate the Arming America after publishing a favorable review. The review was written by Michael Coblenz in January 2001. In the October edition of the periodical Coblenz writes that the common sense premises of the book misled him.
Coblenz fails to recognize that common sense is 180 degrees away from what he thinks it is... and that is what tripped up Bellesiles; the common sense of people who knew better was offended by Bellesiles totally off-the-wall assertions.
After all, he seems to be on board with both their platform and their ethical standards.
Translation:
"Just because it's full of lies, why won't people accept my book's conclusions?
I wrote what Sarah Brady told me to write! Why is everyone being so mean to me?"
Funny thing, Mikey: people take it REALLY personal when you start attacking their civil liberties!
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