There are alot of rferences at the end of the article that I did not copy, as this was so long already- access the URL if you feel you need to see them.
http://hnn.us/articles/1185.html
What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed
By Clayton E. Cramer
Mr. Cramer is a software engineer and historian. His last book was Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Praeger Press, 1999). His web site is http://www.claytoncramer.com.
Michael A. Bellesiles’s Bancroft Prize for Arming America has been revoked—the first time that a Bancroft Prize has ever been taken away from an author.[1] He has also resigned from Emory University after a blistering criticism by a blue-ribbon panel.[2] Is this embarrassing moment for the history profession a fluke, or indicative of deeper problems?
I fear that it isn’t a fluke. Arming America reveals that there are some very serious problems in the history professorate, and they are not confined to just one history professor’s demonstration of hubris. Before I launch into a discussion of these problems, let me tell you why I am writing this article.
My Involvement With the Bellesiles Scandal
I have been described in some articles covering this scandal as Michael Bellesiles’s most persistent critic, and I suppose that this is a fair statement. Bellesiles first presented his rather astonishing claims about gun scarcity in early America in a 1996 Journal of American History paper. At the time, I was a history graduate student, working on my MA thesis at Sonoma State University in California. My thesis examined the development of concealed weapon laws in the early Republic, and what I found completely contradicted Bellesiles’s claim that the early Republic had few guns, and few hunters.
I was so taken aback by Bellesiles’s claims—and in a prestigious journal like the JAH—that I spent a month or two trying to figure out if his claims might be the reason why and where America’s first concealed weapon laws appeared. Fortunately, I knew that in a direct conflict between a professor’s scholarly interpretation of the past, and primary sources, primary sources always win. I chalked up Bellesiles’s claims to zeal and bad luck: picking an atypical set of sources, and attempting to find a useable past—useable for the political purposes that were only thinly veiled in that JAH article. I thought he was wrong, but it did not occur to me that he would actually make anything up, or alter quotes to prove his point.
There’s nothing wrong with an historian having a political goal. It would be a curious matter indeed for any historian to devote years of life to the study of a historical problem, and hold no opinions about its relevance to today’s questions. Ideally, however, the research should direct the opinions, not the other way around.
When the book length version of Bellesiles’s claims, Arming America, appeared in 2000, I received a review copy. My first reaction after reading the first few chapters was a mixture of “There’s a logical flaw here†and “What? Could this possibly be true?†When I reached chapters that covered periods that I knew well—the early Republic—my incredulity increased. Then I started to find Bellesiles using quotations from travel accounts that I had read—and the quotations didn’t match either my memory of them, or the texts, when I re-read them.
I sat down with a list of bizarre, amazing claims that Bellesiles had made, and started chasing down the citations at Sonoma State University’s library. I found quotations of out of context that completely reversed the author’s original intent. I found dates changed. I found the text of statutes changed—and the changes completely reversed the meaning of the law. It took me twelve hours of hunting before I found a citation that was completely correct. In the intervening two years, I have spent thousands of hours chasing down Bellesiles’s citations, and I have found many hundreds of shockingly gross falsifications.
Critical Thinking & History
If Arming America had been a book written by some crank, or even a “popular†historian, I suppose that I would have been disappointed by it, but that was all. But this was not a book by some tinfoil-hat revisionist. Michael Bellesiles was a respected historian at a highly regarded research university. His book won wildly enthusiastic reviews from prominent historians. The dust jacket of Arming America has laudatory remarks by a Who’s Who of American historians. Arming America won the Bancroft Prize—an indicator for the enduring value of a book about American history.
What made this especially disturbing was the reaction of historians, when I first brought to the attention of the scholarly community, through various email lists, that Arming America was not just wrong, but deceptive. My first shot across the bow of Arming America was to point out that Bellesiles had altered the text of the Militia Act of 1792. The text included the words: “every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock.â€[3] Bellesiles changed the passage to read: “every citizen so enrolled, shall...be constantly provided with a good musket or firelock….â€[4] This was not a trivial change; it was evidence that Bellesiles used to demonstrate that guns were rare in America, because, “Congress took upon itself the responsibility of providing those guns….â€[5]
This was not a question of a historian being blindsided by a bad source. Bellesiles cited a number of works for his version of the statute: “Militia Laws; 8-10, 13; U.S. Statutes 1:271-74 (reenacted 2 February 1813, 2:797); Debates and Proceedings in the Congress 3:1392-95; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 128-35.†Had Bellesiles cited only secondary works, such as Militia Laws, or Eagle and Sword, he might have been able to claim that he had been misled. But Bellesiles cited the federal statute in U.S. Statutes (Statutes at Large is the title usually used by legal historians) and Debates and Proceedings in the Congress. Both of these primary sources are in agreement about the text of the statute; they just aren’t in agreement with Bellesiles’s “quote.â€
What astounded me was the reaction of historians. In October of 2000, I sent my complaint (which I will admit was more strongly worded than was politic) to several professional historian email lists. At least two of these list moderators allowed Bellesiles to say that he had made no mistake at all, that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and then shut off any further discussion of the question. I told those moderators, in about two minutes, how they could visit the Library of Congress’s web site, and see the pages in question themselves. It appears that they either couldn’t spend two minutes finding out if a major scandal was brewing, or didn’t consider academic fraud an important matter.
I finally concluded that the only way to establish my credibility was to begin scanning in pages that Bellesiles cited, so that historians could click on a web page address, and see the falsification. (See http://www.claytoncramer.com/columbia.18apr01.htm and http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary.html#MilitiaLaws for a number of examples.) This, plus Professor James Lindgren’s involvement in the question of probate record falsification, finally caused historians to regard this matter as a serious question of scholarly integrity. In the mean time, the credibility of the historical profession fell dramatically among those laypersons who followed the Bellesiles scandal.
How did Bellesiles get away with this? Why did historians take so long to pick up the ball, and run with it? Remember, it was largely because of the efforts of James Lindgren, a law professor, not an historian, and myself, a software engineer who writes history books, that Emory and Columbia University decided to clean up this embarrassment. (In case you are wondering, I write software because I have a family to support, and can’t take the vow of poverty that goes with teaching.)
Cont'd in next post.
http://hnn.us/articles/1185.html
What Clayton Cramer Saw and (Nearly) Everyone Else Missed
By Clayton E. Cramer
Mr. Cramer is a software engineer and historian. His last book was Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Praeger Press, 1999). His web site is http://www.claytoncramer.com.
Michael A. Bellesiles’s Bancroft Prize for Arming America has been revoked—the first time that a Bancroft Prize has ever been taken away from an author.[1] He has also resigned from Emory University after a blistering criticism by a blue-ribbon panel.[2] Is this embarrassing moment for the history profession a fluke, or indicative of deeper problems?
I fear that it isn’t a fluke. Arming America reveals that there are some very serious problems in the history professorate, and they are not confined to just one history professor’s demonstration of hubris. Before I launch into a discussion of these problems, let me tell you why I am writing this article.
My Involvement With the Bellesiles Scandal
I have been described in some articles covering this scandal as Michael Bellesiles’s most persistent critic, and I suppose that this is a fair statement. Bellesiles first presented his rather astonishing claims about gun scarcity in early America in a 1996 Journal of American History paper. At the time, I was a history graduate student, working on my MA thesis at Sonoma State University in California. My thesis examined the development of concealed weapon laws in the early Republic, and what I found completely contradicted Bellesiles’s claim that the early Republic had few guns, and few hunters.
I was so taken aback by Bellesiles’s claims—and in a prestigious journal like the JAH—that I spent a month or two trying to figure out if his claims might be the reason why and where America’s first concealed weapon laws appeared. Fortunately, I knew that in a direct conflict between a professor’s scholarly interpretation of the past, and primary sources, primary sources always win. I chalked up Bellesiles’s claims to zeal and bad luck: picking an atypical set of sources, and attempting to find a useable past—useable for the political purposes that were only thinly veiled in that JAH article. I thought he was wrong, but it did not occur to me that he would actually make anything up, or alter quotes to prove his point.
There’s nothing wrong with an historian having a political goal. It would be a curious matter indeed for any historian to devote years of life to the study of a historical problem, and hold no opinions about its relevance to today’s questions. Ideally, however, the research should direct the opinions, not the other way around.
When the book length version of Bellesiles’s claims, Arming America, appeared in 2000, I received a review copy. My first reaction after reading the first few chapters was a mixture of “There’s a logical flaw here†and “What? Could this possibly be true?†When I reached chapters that covered periods that I knew well—the early Republic—my incredulity increased. Then I started to find Bellesiles using quotations from travel accounts that I had read—and the quotations didn’t match either my memory of them, or the texts, when I re-read them.
I sat down with a list of bizarre, amazing claims that Bellesiles had made, and started chasing down the citations at Sonoma State University’s library. I found quotations of out of context that completely reversed the author’s original intent. I found dates changed. I found the text of statutes changed—and the changes completely reversed the meaning of the law. It took me twelve hours of hunting before I found a citation that was completely correct. In the intervening two years, I have spent thousands of hours chasing down Bellesiles’s citations, and I have found many hundreds of shockingly gross falsifications.
Critical Thinking & History
If Arming America had been a book written by some crank, or even a “popular†historian, I suppose that I would have been disappointed by it, but that was all. But this was not a book by some tinfoil-hat revisionist. Michael Bellesiles was a respected historian at a highly regarded research university. His book won wildly enthusiastic reviews from prominent historians. The dust jacket of Arming America has laudatory remarks by a Who’s Who of American historians. Arming America won the Bancroft Prize—an indicator for the enduring value of a book about American history.
What made this especially disturbing was the reaction of historians, when I first brought to the attention of the scholarly community, through various email lists, that Arming America was not just wrong, but deceptive. My first shot across the bow of Arming America was to point out that Bellesiles had altered the text of the Militia Act of 1792. The text included the words: “every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock.â€[3] Bellesiles changed the passage to read: “every citizen so enrolled, shall...be constantly provided with a good musket or firelock….â€[4] This was not a trivial change; it was evidence that Bellesiles used to demonstrate that guns were rare in America, because, “Congress took upon itself the responsibility of providing those guns….â€[5]
This was not a question of a historian being blindsided by a bad source. Bellesiles cited a number of works for his version of the statute: “Militia Laws; 8-10, 13; U.S. Statutes 1:271-74 (reenacted 2 February 1813, 2:797); Debates and Proceedings in the Congress 3:1392-95; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 128-35.†Had Bellesiles cited only secondary works, such as Militia Laws, or Eagle and Sword, he might have been able to claim that he had been misled. But Bellesiles cited the federal statute in U.S. Statutes (Statutes at Large is the title usually used by legal historians) and Debates and Proceedings in the Congress. Both of these primary sources are in agreement about the text of the statute; they just aren’t in agreement with Bellesiles’s “quote.â€
What astounded me was the reaction of historians. In October of 2000, I sent my complaint (which I will admit was more strongly worded than was politic) to several professional historian email lists. At least two of these list moderators allowed Bellesiles to say that he had made no mistake at all, that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and then shut off any further discussion of the question. I told those moderators, in about two minutes, how they could visit the Library of Congress’s web site, and see the pages in question themselves. It appears that they either couldn’t spend two minutes finding out if a major scandal was brewing, or didn’t consider academic fraud an important matter.
I finally concluded that the only way to establish my credibility was to begin scanning in pages that Bellesiles cited, so that historians could click on a web page address, and see the falsification. (See http://www.claytoncramer.com/columbia.18apr01.htm and http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary.html#MilitiaLaws for a number of examples.) This, plus Professor James Lindgren’s involvement in the question of probate record falsification, finally caused historians to regard this matter as a serious question of scholarly integrity. In the mean time, the credibility of the historical profession fell dramatically among those laypersons who followed the Bellesiles scandal.
How did Bellesiles get away with this? Why did historians take so long to pick up the ball, and run with it? Remember, it was largely because of the efforts of James Lindgren, a law professor, not an historian, and myself, a software engineer who writes history books, that Emory and Columbia University decided to clean up this embarrassment. (In case you are wondering, I write software because I have a family to support, and can’t take the vow of poverty that goes with teaching.)
Cont'd in next post.