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December 8, 2001

Historian’s Prizewinning Book on Guns Is Embroiled in a
Scandal

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Only 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 outcome, 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 repeatedly 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 c?l?bre for 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 serious 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 more 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 percentage 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 documents 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 earlier 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 goes 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 matched, 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 use 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 with 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 Area 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
hundreds 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 Professor
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.
Bellesiles 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, “If 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