academic fraud
Abstract on Bellesiles scandal
The abstract of Prof. James Lindgren's paper on Bellesiles is online.
Bellesiles authored "Arming America," which claimed that Americans were poorly armed and had no real gun culture until after the Civil War.
" Superb historians praised it on its release. Yet even from the beginning, there were those who found disturbing differences between Arming America and its sources. As time has passed and other scholars have entered the debate, these errors - which once looked like such serious defects that they could not be true - have been confirmed.The book and the scandal it generated are hard to understand. How could Bellesiles count guns in about a hundred Providence wills that never existed, count guns in San Francisco County inventories that were apparently destroyed in 1906, report national means that are mathematically impossible, change the condition of most guns in a way that fits his thesis, misreport the counts of guns in censuses or militia reports, have over a 60% error rate in finding guns in Vermont estates, and have a 100% error rate in finding homicide cases in the Plymouth records he cites?"
Also, via Gene Volokh, here's the link to the Chronicle of Higher Ed's webpage on the affair.
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Hoffer writes the book on L'affaire Bellesiles
Peter Hoffer's "Past Imperfect: Facts, Fiction and Fraud, American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis and Goodwin" does an excellent job of tracking the rise and downfall of Michael Bellesiles. For those who weren't following the controversy, MB was a professor of history at Emory; his book "Arming America" claimed that Americans had little or no "gun culture" before the Civil War.
His downfall came when computer programmer and amateur historian Clayton Cramer fact-checked his sources and discovered that ... not to put too fine a point on it, large portions seemed to be fabricated. The community of professional historians initially rallied to defend Bellesiles against this attack by an amateur. Eventually, however, the William and Mary Quarterly created a team of three respected professionals to settle the controversy -- and the three found that, indeed, there had been academic misconduct. Bellesiles resigned his position and the publisher withdrew the book from publication.
Here's a review of Hoffer's book on the matter.
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