From the issue dated February 1, 2002
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Did the Shootouts Over 'Arming America' Divert Attention From the Real Issues?Scholars heaped praise on a book, ignoring critics who have been vindicated on many pointsBy DANNY POSTEL Rarely has a new issue of The William and Mary Quarterly been as intensely anticipated
The stakes are high. Mr. Bellesiles's scholarly reputation is on the line. So too is the reputation of the historical profession, which many believe blindly embraced a seriously flawed work and lagged in responding to the controversy. Indeed, the Emory University history professor opens his own contribution to the forum by likening himself to a French mutineer placed before a firing squad at the end of World War I, whose last words were, "I am honored by all this attention." Arming America's initial reception was anything but a firing squad for Mr. Bellesiles. Upon its publication, by Alfred A. Knopf in September 2000, many of his peers embraced his thesis that Americans have not always been heavily armed, that the "gun culture" of the United States is a relatively recent, post-Civil War phenomenon. Two eminent historians lavished praise on Arming America in two of the most prominent places a book can be reviewed: Garry Wills on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and Edmund Morgan in The New York Review of Books. And last year, it snagged the coveted Bancroft Prize for historical excellence. (The Chronicle Review ran an excerpt from the book shortly after it was published.) The acclaim for the book was so great, in fact, that it drowned out attacks, largely from gun-rights absolutists and amateur historians, who said the research was shoddy, even fraudulent. Tinged as they were with ideological invective and accompanied in some cases by bellicose personal attacks on Mr. Bellesiles, such voices were largely dismissed by scholars. Fearing for his safety, Mr. Bellesiles withdrew from online discussions of his work and concealed his e-mail address, even while his scholarly star was on the ascent. But more recent criticisms have been harder for Mr. Bellesiles's fellow historians to ignore, and perhaps pose an even greater threat to him. Scholars and reporters alike have been raising serious questions about the documentary evidence in Arming America -- of county probate records in particular -- and the conclusions Mr. Bellesiles drew from them. Lobbying hardest for this reversal of fortune has been James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern University and a quantitative scholar with a particular interest in probate records, which are, arguably, key building blocks for Mr. Bellesiles's thesis. In examining Mr. Bellesiles's claims about those records, Mr. Lindgren says he found dozens of serious errors, and when he confronted the historian, he received what he says were implausible and sometimes contradictory explanations. "It is unprecedented for such a celebrated work of scholarship," says Mr. Lindgren, "to contain as many errors" as Arming America does. The two have faced off only once, on a radio program a year ago. Mr. Lindgren says he will engage in dialogue again with Mr. Bellesiles "only in a scholarly setting." Mr. Bellesiles says he will meet with Mr. Lindgren "when hell freezes over. I don't want to be in the same room with him." Now, as Mr. Lindgren has ratcheted up the pressure by making his case in the news media and in the court of scholarly opinion, Mr. Bellesiles has taken a different tack, keeping a low profile though offering up more-nuanced explanations. While acknowledging that he has committed errors, he insists that they were not deliberate misrepresentations and that he deeply regrets leaving some with that impression. He characterizes the attack by certain quantitative social scientists as "the jihad of technical nitpickers." He also maintains that the core arguments of Arming America remain intact, a point hotly disputed by his detractors, including at least one initially enthusiastic reviewer who has now recanted in print. "I allowed myself to be seduced by the thrill of a thesis that overturned common wisdom," says John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture. Whether the release of the William and Mary Quarterly forum will satisfy many scholars or just throw fuel on the fire, it is unlikely to answer certain questions: If Mr. Bellesiles is right in maintaining that his mistakes were few and of little consequence, why do things look as dire as they do for him? If Mr. Lindgren, however, is correct in arguing that Arming America is shot through with errors -- or worse -- then why has it taken the historical profession so long to take the author's most trenchant critics seriously? Professor on the Brink Despite the dark cloud hanging over him, Mr. Bellesiles (pronounced Bell-EEL) is upbeat and engaging. Over margaritas at a restaurant in Chicago, where he is spending the academic year as a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Newberry Library, he talks excitedly about his intellectual and personal path, his passion for the enterprise of history, and the joys of being a father. A diminutive man of 48, Mr. Bellesiles has a dry wit that flashes in a belt buckle he sometimes wears; it proclaims, "GOD, GUNS & GUTS MADE AMERICA FREE." But weathering the storm over Arming America has taken much of the pleasure out of the subject for Mr. Bellesiles. "I've lost my sense of humor about it," he says. Arming America, only his second book, and the ensuing furor, he says have burned him out. They have also forced him to reconsider a number of things in his life. He was, for example, a registered Republican for decades, but recently switched to being an independent. He describes himself as a "Burkean conservative," which is to say a believer in tradition and authority -- as opposed to an individualist or libertarian conservative, a camp he now identifies with Second Amendment "fundamentalists" of the sort who have been on the warpath against him. A longtime gun owner and skeet shooter, he is now mulling over "what it means to be a Christian and own guns." As much as he'd prefer to leave Arming America behind him now, the continuing controversy over the book won't allow it. He believes much of the maelstrom could have been avoided had he simply junked the few paragraphs of the 603-page book that deal with probate records showing many of the items in the possession of the deceased -- everything from bibles and pieces of furniture to pairs of broken glasses. Mr. Bellesiles used probate records as part of the evidence for his bold thesis that gun ownership in early America was quite rare. Yet he stresses that probate records were only one of multiple sources he relied on. He also used "militia records, legislative materials -- colonial, imperial, local, state, and federal -- police and court files, travel accounts, Ordinance Office records, U.S. Army materials, memoirs and diaries, newspapers and journals, personal letters and official correspondence, account books and production records, novels and short stories, woodcuts and paintings," by his account. But he did not, he explains, touching on one of the more controversial aspects of the debate, maintain a database. Instead, he says he chronicled his research with old-fashioned yellow legal pads and pencils. When examining probate records, he jotted down thousands of tick marks to indicate how many guns were listed in them. And those notepads were damaged when his office at Emory was flooded, in September 2000, leaving them unreadable. (Emory confirms that Mr. Bellesiles's office was indeed flooded.) While Mr. Bellesiles contends that his study does not depend on the probate evidence, his critics argue that without that material, the foundation of Arming America collapses. If Mr. Bellesiles cannot demonstrate with documentary evidence that gun ownership in early America was as uncommon as he claims it was, they maintain, the rest of his argument unravels. Mr. Lindgren asserts that Arming America's probate data are internally inconsistent and mathematically impossible, and that such errors "are dramatic and go to the heart of his book's argument -- how many guns there were, who owned them, where they were kept, what condition they were in, how they were used, and how important they were in early America." Glowing Reviews The research for Arming America took a decade. In 1996, Mr. Bellesiles published an early report of his findings as an article in The Journal of American History. That article won the Binkley-Stephenson Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best scholarly article published in The Journal of American History in 1996. It instantly created a buzz, not only among historians but among right-to-bear-arms activists. Clayton Cramer, a pro-gun activist and writer, began following Mr. Bellesiles's research with extravagant care. In 1999, as reports of Arming America's imminent publication circulated, the National Rifle Association's president, Charlton Heston, denounced Mr. Bellesiles, accusing him of having "too much time on his hands." The book itself was met with lavish praise. Arming America "changes everything," wrote Michael Zuckerman, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. "The way we think about guns and violence in America," he went on, "will never be the same." Michael Kammen, a past president of the Organization of American Historians, called it a "classic work." Its self-conscious contrariety surely contributed to the swoonfest: Conventional wisdom -- both popular belief and the historical literature -- presumed that Americans have always been heavily armed. But gun ownership, Mr. Bellesiles claims, was in fact exceptional from early colonial times until the Civil War. Most guns were in disrepair, and there were few gunsmiths to fix them. Moreover, Mr. Bellesiles argues, Americans didn't care very much about the guns they did own; the pervasive "gun culture" that exists today, he says, was conspicuously absent in early America. That thesis flies in the face of the right-to-bear-arms vision of a heavily armed America in which guns have always occupied a pivotal, some would say sacred, place. Right-to-bear-arms activists mounted an all-out campaign, not just against Arming America but against its author. While Mr. Bellesiles says he never expected to become the object of such scorn, some regard his avowed surprise as naive and possibly contrived. After all, not only does he set out to destroy the notion that America has always had a "gun culture"; he argues that exploding that "myth" makes it clear that things need not remain as they are -- that, in his words, "what has been made can be unmade." Right in the introduction to the book, Mr. Bellesiles takes aim at the National Rifle Association and other organs of the gun culture (gun manufacturers, Guns & Ammo magazine, etc.). Given how highly organized the gun lobby and its activist base are, it seems fairly plain that Mr. Bellesiles was walking into a political minefield. But no degree of political savvy could have prepared Mr. Bellesiles for the ferocity of the attacks from pro-gun activists. Within weeks of Arming America's publication, he began to receive harassing and threatening telephone calls, e-mail messages containing computer viruses, and not-so-veiled threats to his family. From September to December 2000, he says, he received "thousands of angry and even vicious" e-mail messages, an experience that left him with no option, he felt, but to change his e-mail address and withdraw from online discussions of his book. He grew so concerned about the safety of his family that he moved them to an undisclosed location. "If I thought for a moment that it would end the harassment of my family and me," Mr. Bellesiles reflects, "I would immediately say, 'I am wrong and you are right.' But it would not end the harassment." Still, he maintained a brave face. In January 2001, at the annual conference of the American Historical Association, he got an anonymous phone call in his hotel room the night before he was to present a paper. The caller told him that he had "better not appear" at the panel. He did, though, and announced, "If the person who called last night would like to talk to me, I'd be happy to do so after the panel." In the face of such tactics, the historical profession rallied to Mr. Bellesiles's defense, with leading scholarly groups and many individual historians denouncing the campaign against him. But even as some scholars stood behind their colleague, others began raising serious questions about his source material and methodology. By far the most industrious of those critics is Mr. Lindgren, the 49-year-old director of faculty research at Northwestern's law school. He has built the most comprehensive case to date against Arming America. An expert in probate records and quantitative methodology, Mr. Lindgren was well equipped to scrutinize those parts of Arming America that turn out to have been most vulnerable to attack. Randolph Roth, a professor of history at Ohio State University and a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Methods, calls Mr. Lindgren an "eminent scholar within the legal profession" and says that Mr. Lindgren's work on probate records is "the most subtle, sophisticated analysis" he has ever seen on the subject. Sitting across the table from Mr. Lindgren at a downtown Chicago diner feels a bit like being in the jury box during a high-stakes trial. As the self-appointed prosecutor in the Bellesiles case, he wields an arsenal of documentary evidence -- large volumes of historical court records and probate materials, stacks of photocopied articles, and a spiral-bound document he has assembled himself, a legal brief of sorts outlining his case against Arming America. Mr. Lindgren uses the dossier in faculty workshops and distributes it to journalists. There are no pauses as he lays out his arguments. He is indefatigable in marshaling the evidence and explaining it in painstaking detail. A heavy-set man with unwavering focus, Mr. Lindgren says he started looking at Mr. Bellesiles's research not to dismantle it, but out of his interest in probate records and statistical analysis. He contacted Mr. Bellesiles a few days before Arming America's publication to ask the author about some of his data, having "no idea" that they could be wrong. "It never occurred to me," he says. But he started to become suspicious, he says, when, in the course of his correspondence with Mr. Bellesiles, the historian provided answers to Mr. Lindgren's questions that didn't check out. For example, Mr. Lindgren says that Mr. Bellesiles told him that he had done most of his reading of state probate inventories on microfilm at a National Archives center in East Point, Ga. When Mr. Lindgren called the center, however, he was told that it had no such records. (To make sure there wasn't a mistake, he had two other people call. They got the same results.) When Mr. Lindgren brought those discrepancies to Mr. Bellesiles's attention, the latter offered responses that, according to Mr. Lindgren, contradicted his previous statements and seemed highly implausible. It was beginning to appear, says Mr. Lindgren, as though Mr. Bellesiles had a "hard time keeping his story straight." Shootout The two scholars went head to head in January 2001 on a Chicago public-radio broadcast about Arming America. On that program, Mr. Lindgren argued that there are grave empirical flaws in the book and that Mr. Bellesiles had been less than consistent in his account of his research. Mr. Lindgren then made his most damning allegation of all: that the Bellesiles case raised questions about academic ethics. Mr. Lindgren now elaborates that the ethical standards of the American Historical Association require its members to share their research data (after publication) when asked, so that other scholars may replicate the findings. Mr. Bellesiles, he says, has in more than one instance violated that code -- a charge echoed by Mr. Roth. Mr. Bellesiles was jarred. "I've spent 18 years learning the subtleties, complexities, and nuances of the archives. My work has been reviewed every step of the way by historians who know these archives," he said on the broadcast. Mr. Lindgren had questioned his "very integrity as a scholar and a person," he said. "I want to ask him: Does that seem fair and reasonable?" Although Mr. Bellesiles now reflects that he "may be too thin-skinned" for such confrontations, he launched a salvo of his own. He challenged Mr. Lindgren's competence as a commentator on Arming America, stressing that Mr. Lindgren is an "attorney," not a historian, and is "thus adversarial in nature." Mr. Lindgren replied that while he may be a lawyer, he is also a scholar who has taught at several universities and heads the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Law and the Social Sciences. The dispute over disciplinary territoriality is turning out to be central to the Bellesiles controversy. Indeed, Mr. Lindgren himself has raised the same question, but puts it to Mr. Bellesiles's colleagues in history. Historians not trained in quantitative analysis and statistical methodology were ill equipped, he argues, to pass judgment on Arming America and allowed a disturbing number of errors to slip past them. In a forthcoming article in the William and Mary Law Review, Mr. Lindgren proposes reforms in the academic training of historians that might prevent what he calls such "unfortunate episodes" from happening in the future. Would-be historians, he says, should do more work in quantitative methods and gain a wider appreciation of expertise in other fields, ones outside their normal purview. The Second Wave In the year following the book's publication, Mr. Lindgren and other critics laid siege to Arming America. While Mr. Bellesiles's earliest opponents tended to be ideological and nonacademic, the second wave of critics consisted of academics with no apparent political agenda who pursued their criticisms of Mr. Bellesiles's work, by and large, in a scholarly fashion. They have been joined by reporters who conducted their own investigations. Mr. Bellesiles has suggested that his critics are politically motivated. Mr. Lindgren says that most of the author's academic critics are anything but, and, like Mr. Lindgren himself, favor gun control. Their criticisms of the book, he says, are simply about the facts: Did Mr. Bellesiles get things right in Arming America, or did he get them wrong? "I do think that politics are relevant," says Mr. Lindgren. "But only after you figure out what happened. Once you figure out what happened, then politics can explain either why Bellesiles's critics were wrong, or maybe why his critics were right but were viewed as wrong for a while." Mr. Lindgren occupies an ambiguous, some might say curious, position with respect to the news media in all of this. He stresses that he doesn't want to be seen as hounding Mr. Bellesiles, and insists that reporters have come to him more than he has gone to them. If anything, he says, it is Mr. Bellesiles who has taken his case to the press, granting an interview to Playboy and writing pieces for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Wall Street Journal, and other mainstream publications, whereas Mr. Lindgren has focused on scholarly venues. He even declined to be photographed for this article, explaining that he would prefer not to figure too prominently in the Bellesiles affair. Yet Mr. Lindgren's name is virtually ubiquitous in the news media's coverage of the story. And he has not played a passive role. Aside from distributing his Bellesiles brief to journalists, he talks to them -- a lot. Moreover, he sends elaborate e-mail messages to reporters that are at once resourceful and highly prescriptive. They contain long lists of scholars who are critical of Mr. Bellesiles, along with their contact information; emphatic suggestions about how to approach the story and whom to interview; and an obstacle course of tags indicating which comments are on the record and which are off. And his lobbying extends beyond reporters. Mr. Lindgren has approached a number of scholars who have written favorably about Arming America and urged them to reconsider their positions -- in print. Matthew Warshauer, a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, for example, says that Mr. Lindgren not only contacted him repeatedly but suggested the language in which his retraction should be worded. "I hear more from [Mr. Lindgren] than I do from my own wife," he says. Mr. Bellesiles says he has "never heard of such a concerted effort to revise the scholarly response to a work of history." Other scholars agree that such a modus operandi is out of the ordinary in academe. Mr. Lindgren says he "simply asked" the scholars in question, who had made statements in their reviews of Arming America that he viewed as incorrect, to either "support their claims" or "note online that they no longer" maintained them. He defends the practice, arguing that "one could avoid much acrimony if more people privately suggested that scholars correct their own errors rather than just attacking [them] publicly." Growing Concern Whatever Mr. Lindgren's role as catalyst, his skepticism now seems shared by plenty of other independent investigators. In September, for example, The Boston Globe found that some of Mr. Bellesiles's claims failed to check out against the sources he cited and that one of the sites at which Mr. Bellesiles said he had consulted probate records turned out not to contain those documents. When confronted with those findings, Mr. Bellesiles responded that he had committed an "egregious error." As for the probate records' location, he said that he must have examined them somewhere else but could not remember where. "I know it may be difficult for those who have not spent years in dozens of archives to appreciate, but I cannot recall where I read every document over the 10 years I researched Arming America," he says. (Mr. Bellesiles recently informed The Chronicle that in January he was finally able to locate the records, and he supplied sample copies of them. Mr. Lindgren replies that this is Mr. Bellesiles's "fourth different story about the location" of the records. "We'll have to check," he says.) The screw was turned tighter when Mr. Bellesiles finally did respond in an academic forum. Given what he called "the seriousness of the accusations . . . concerning the validity of Mr. Bellesiles's research methods and results," the chairman of Emory's history department, James Melton, asked him in October 2001 to fashion a formal, detailed reply "in an appropriate professional venue" -- not just, in other words, on his Web site, where Mr. Bellesiles had posted a number of rebuttals. Mr. Bellesiles published his defense in the November 2001 issue of the newsletter of the Organization of American Historians. In the article, "Disarming the Critics," he reiterated that some of his claims "may be errors." "If so," he wrote, "I stand corrected. But I certainly did not seek to mislead anyone with these mistakes." Robert A. Paul, dean of Emory's main undergraduate college, commended Mr. Bellesiles "for beginning this process of engaging his critics." He called the article the "first step in a long process, as we see it, a process of careful and thoughtful scholarly debate." But to the consternation of many of his defenders, Mr. Bellesiles offered little detail in his statement and did not respond to many of the toughest criticisms that had been made about the book. And critics saw the essay as evasive, as an exercise in sophistry rather than serious intellectual engagement. Mr. Bellesiles, said Mr. Lindgren, did not "refute any of the serious, carefully documented criticisms of the scholars who have been poring over the book." The National Review asked bluntly, "Why won't Michael Bellesiles seriously respond to his critics?" Doubt has even been sowed among some who had praised the book when it appeared. Edmund Morgan, the professor emeritus of history at Yale University who praised Arming America in The New York Review of Books, calls some of the accusations against Mr. Bellesiles's book "pretty incriminating." He says that while it would be "difficult to disprove" the book's central contention -- that the gun culture in America really took hold only after the Civil War -- "if people do find that Bellesiles has cheated on the evidence, it could discredit the whole thesis." (Mr. Morgan has not written anything about the subject since his review and says he will not. Garry Wills declined to be interviewed for this article, explaining he would need more time than he currently has to properly reconsider the matter.) John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, is less ambivalent. He found Arming America, he now says, "of unfailing interest," and said so in a review of the book that ran on the cover of the journal's September/October 2000 issue. But in the January/February 2002 issue, he offers a stinging reappraisal in light of recent evidence. He was "badly wrong" in his initial judgment, though it took him "a while," he now writes, "to grasp just how wrong." (Mr. Wilson was not among those reviewers contacted by Mr. Lindgren.) "For reasons both good and bad," he reflects, "much is taken on trust in the world of scholarship, despite the ideal of rigorous evaluation." Controversial Silence Mr. Bellesiles has not fielded the second wave of criticism -- from his academic colleagues -- in as forthright, engaging, or prompt a fashion as many of his supporters wish he would have. To supporters and critics alike, his evasiveness has made him appear to be hiding something. He was, he concedes, embattled, embittered, perhaps even shell-shocked by the experience of dealing with the first salvos against his book -- the ad hominem attacks, harassment, and threats. And some acknowledge that Clayton Cramer, Mr. Bellesiles's most vocal early critic, may have been correct that some of the numbers in Arming America did not add up. But Mr. Cramer's bombastic, in-your-face rhetoric simply went beyond the pale of serious intellectual debate. When the second, more civil and scholarly set of criticisms of Arming America surfaced, Mr. Bellesiles says, he was still in a defensive crouch, ill-equipped to process them and formulate the kind of thorough responses that they called for. "The initial attacks made me unfortunately suspicious and defensive, neither of which is a quality I admire," he says. "I'm not sure how to avoid either at this point, but as a historian, I believe in the power of time to clarify truth and expose error. So a little patience is probably in order." Indeed, a little patience has been the response of most scholars to the Bellesiles controversy. For all of the stink raised by Mr. Lindgren and others, most scholars interviewed for this article say they are waiting to read the debate in The William and Mary Quarterly before making up their minds. (As is Emory University. Dean Paul has not spoken on the Bellesiles matter since November, and won't until after the forum is published.) Lee W. Formwalt, executive director of the Organization of American Historians, says he thinks there has been a "rush to judgment" by some journalists and scholars. "The debate is ongoing," he says. We'll be better able to judge the Bellesiles case, he says, "once the dust settles and the William and Mary Quarterly forum comes out." That forum will feature contributions by four leading experts on early America -- Ira Gruber, a professor of history at Rice University; Gloria Main, a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Jack Rakove, a professor of history and American studies at Stanford University; and Ohio State's Mr. Roth -- along with a response by Mr. Bellesiles. While many scholars view the forum as a kind of final word on the matter, Mr. Roth says that in his response to his interlocutors, Mr. Bellesiles dodges important criticisms and leaves a number of key questions unanswered. Moreover, he says, Mr. Bellesiles refused to make his source data available for posting on The William and Mary Quarterly's Web site. In doing so, Mr. Bellesiles "makes it impossible for scholars to resolve the controversy." Others remain staunch defenders of the book, whatever the outcome of the forum. So while some of Mr. Bellesiles's critics have urged the Bancroft committee to reconsider its awarding of the prize to Arming America, a spokesman says that "the committee stands by its decision." Arming America's editor at Knopf, Jane Garrett, likewise says that the publisher "stands behind" Mr. Bellesiles. "I realize that he made some errors," she says, "but they certainly were not made intentionally. They were the result of some over-quick research." Mr. Bellesiles has "satisfied" Knopf, she says, with "all that he has done to explain things" and by "getting his mistakes corrected." Would Knopf do things differently if it could start all over with Arming America? "There's nothing we could do," she says. "We can't go and re-research the book -- and neither can the people who review manuscripts for us. So we simply have to trust the author. It's a difficult thing." Meanwhile, Mr. Bellesiles is in a kind of limbo, awaiting his peers' judgment. He is postponing the proposed second and third volumes of what was originally conceived as a trilogy on the history of guns in America. While he hopes for vindication, he knows it may not be a clean sweep. He says he's eager to get back to his "non-gun related research." Passing Judgment While Mr. Bellesiles tries to move on, others are trying to judge what went wrong with this book, and how the history profession reacted to it. Don Hickey, a professor of history at Wayne State College, in Nebraska, originally supported Arming America's thesis (he peer-reviewed the Journal of American History article and recommended its publication), but has since come to regard Mr. Bellesiles's work as not merely flawed but fraudulent. "It is a case," he recently told the Chicago Tribune, "of genuine, bona fide academic fraud." What consequences has the Bellesiles controversy had for the historical profession? Mr. Roth says that Arming America was an exciting example of "history addressing an important social issue in a courageous way." "If it were true," he says, "this would be history at its best. The problem is it just happens to be wrong." He calls the episode "a crushing blow." If Arming America's early critics were ideologically motivated, could the same be said of the book's early enthusiasts? Mr. Lindgren says that the book was treated "not as a matter of evidence, but rather as one of narrative, taste, and politics." He adds: "When someone makes unlikely statistical claims, provides no sample sizes or cell counts, does not cite the sources used, and makes one implausible statement after another about the completeness of archival records, scholars should be pointing this out, not climbing over one another to jump on the bandwagon." "We may ultimately learn more," he says, from considering why many scholars "suspended their critical judgment" than "from guessing precisely how and why Bellesiles published mistaken data." In the National Review, Melissa Seckora has speculated that many reviewers "uncritically embraced" Arming America "because it appeared to confirm what they have long wanted to believe" about the politics of guns in America. "One could only imagine the outcry," she wrote, "if a conservative scholar, fabricating evidence to prove a pet conservative point, had been found to be careless (to say the least)." While some historians who praised Arming America say now that they didn't have time to check the footnotes, scholars have found time in the past -- when a controversial scholarly work challenged widely held views in academe. When The Bell Curve analyzed the academic performance of black students in a way that offended many professors, there was no shortage of scholars with the time to pick over its every detail. THE 'ARMING AMERICA' CONTROVERSY September 1996 Michael A. Bellesiles, a historian at Emory University, publishes "The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865" in The Journal of American History, an article based on the research that will culminate in Arming America. April 1997 The paper wins the Organization of American Historians' Binkley-Stephenson Award for the best scholarly article published in The Journal of American History in 1996. November 1999 Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, assails Mr. Bellesiles's research, saying he has "too much time on his hands." September 2000 Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture is published by Alfred A. Knopf. The New York Times Book Review publishes a highly favorable review by the Northwestern University historian Garry Wills on its cover. October 2000 The New York Review of Books publishes a positive review of Arming America by Edmund Morgan, an emeritus professor of history at Yale University. November 2000 Debates over Arming America rage among historians (both professional and amateur) on several Internet discussion boards. Mr. Bellesiles receives veiled death threats and, the next month, retreats from online debates about his work. April 2001 Arming America is awarded Columbia University's prestigious Bancroft Prize in history. The Columbia Conservative Club holds a teach-in about the book to protest Mr. Bellesiles's receiving the award. June 2001 The governing councils of the American Historical Association and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture pass a resolution condemning "harassment" of Mr. Bellesiles and defending "a tradition of free exchange of ideas." September 2001 Arming America is published as a Vintage paperback. The Boston Globe and National Review publish articles challenging Mr. Bellesiles's scholarship. October 2001 The Organization of American Historians' Executive Board passes the resolution approved by the other historians' groups. Emory University asks Mr. Bellesiles to fashion a formal response to his critics in a professional, scholarly venue. November 2001 Mr. Bellesiles publishes "Disarming the Critics," the response requested by Emory, in the Organization of American Historians' newsletter. National Review publishes a follow-up article on Mr. Bellesiles, accusing him of failing to respond forthrightly to his critics. February 2002 The William and Mary Quarterly publishes a forum debating Arming America.
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
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