Michael Bellesiles, the historian accused of research falsification in his book Arming America, a study of gun culture, announced on October 25 that he was resigning from Emory University, citing a "hostile environment" [see Jon Wiener, "Fire at Will," November 4]. His resignation, effective at the end of the year, came the very afternoon that Emory released the report of a three-person external board that had been asked to review some of the charges leveled against Bellesiles over the past two years by a number of critics. Bellesiles's book, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize awarded by Columbia University to top works in history and was widely acclaimed when it came out, argues that our gun culture was created in the Civil War era and that in eighteenth-century America, guns were much less significant. As evidence, he relied in part on probate records from the time; difficulty in reproducing the original research on the subject is what spurred on the critics and led, eventually, to Emory's review board.
-
Noted.
Civil liberties, at home and abroad; saving Jeff Wood from Texas's death row.
-
Supreme Politics
The Supreme Court's final rulings remind us that civil rights and a sane vision of the Constitution rest with the next President's judicial appointments.
-
Fizzling on FISA
Obama and other Senate Democrats should not let a lame-duck Administration compromise our liberties in the name of pursuing terrorists.
-
Noted.
George Carlin knew words could never be as obscene as wars; Barack Obama goes for the money, but at what cost?
-
A Subprime Bailout
Congress bails out the banks, but needs to do far more for homeowners devastated by the subprime crisis.
-
Noted.
Katrina vanden Heuvel analyzes the shuttering of Moscow's English-language alternative newspaper, the eXile; John Cavanagh remembers Stewart Mott.
-
The Audacity of Insiders
Barack Obama may yet become the reform President who rearranges power on behalf of the people. But he'll need to resist the brotherhood of cozy insiders.
In his response to the Emory panel's report, Bellesiles writes that he excluded those years because the colonial governments were then passing out guns to militias, which would have skewed a picture of peacetime gun ownership. (Bellesiles has admitted that Table 1 contains serious errors and has been working to correct them for a second edition of the book.) He also notes that he examined legislative, military, business, journalistic and other records, the "probate records constituting only five of 1347 footnotes" in his book, and that "the evidence from the probate records could be eliminated entirely and the thesis of the book would still stand."
For his part, Wiener comments that the university "had a kind of tunnel vision" in the way it restricted the panel's mission. "Since the issue here is Bellesiles's integrity as a historian, the Emory inquiry should have been as sweeping as the stakes, instead of being tied to a few pages in a great big book. And if Bellesiles is right in his reply, then those distinguished historians are guilty of some of the same sins they accuse him of committing: suppressing inconvenient evidence, spinning the data their way, refusing to follow leads that didn't serve their thesis. The point is not to condemn them for their inability to achieve the scrupulousness they demanded of Bellesiles. The point is that historians have to deal with the messy confusion of things, and they offer interpretations of it. Historical knowledge advances by the testing of interpretations, not by stifling interpreters, and not by indicting the interpreter's character for flaws in a table."
Statements of the review board and Bellesiles can be reached via www.emory.edu/central/NEWS.
- Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
- If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.

Buzzflash
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Newsvine
Reddit