Posted on 04/26/2002 7:55:18 AM PDT by CurlyDave
NEW YORK (AP) - A team of scholars is investigating a disputed, prize-winning book about the role of guns in the United States.
The dean of Emory University, where author Michael Bellesiles is a professor of history, asked for the panel after the school concluded its own inquiry of "Arming America," according to a statement issued Thursday by the school.
Robert Paul, dean of the Atlanta-based college, "has concluded that further investigation would be warranted by an independent committee of distinguished scholars from outside Emory," the statement said. However, the statement did not specify why the new investigation was necessary or say who was on the committee, which is expected to finish its work by the end of the summer.
Paul did not immediately respond to messages left by The Associated Press. Bellesiles, on a fellowship for the academic year, also did not immediately return messages.
When Emory first announced its inquiry, in February, Paul said that the school was "addressing allegations of misconduct in research."
Bellesiles (pronounced Bell-EEL) spent 10 years working on "Arming America," published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2000. The book challenges the idea that the United States has always been a gun-oriented culture and that well-armed militias were essential to the Revolutionary War.
Relying on numerous sources, Bellesiles writes that only a small percentage of people possessed firearms in colonial times and that militias were mostly ineffective. Only after the Civil War, he contends, did guns become important to the culture.
"Arming America" was praised in both The New York Times and The New York Review of Books and won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history. Many cited it as a devastating statement against America's alleged historical love affair with firearms.
"The way we think about guns and violence in America will never be the same," wrote Michael Zuckerman, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. "Michael Bellesiles is the NRA's worst nightmare."
Gun advocates quickly attacked the book, with National Rifle Association president, actor Charlton Heston, complaining that Bellesiles had "too much time on his hands."
But scholars and critics also became skeptical. Bellesiles has been accused of ideological bias, selective scholarship and misleading statements. Some corrections already have been made in the paperback edition, and Bellesiles' editor at Knopf, Jane Garrett, has said that "other corrections will be made in subsequent printings."
Bellesiles, in published reports, has acknowledged some errors but defends his book as fundamentally sound.
My inner pedant is drooling.
I would strongly suggest that anyone who wants a copy find it in a library and photocopy the parts he wants. This may well cost more than actually buying the book, but anyone who buys it makes its supposed "popularity" increase and sends a royalty to the author.
Sort of like giving aid & comfort to the enemy in time of war...
Nobody has been able to locate the vast number of sources he "quotes", and he claims his notes were destroyed in flooding of his office building - something that he mysteriously failed to report at the time of the flooding! "Dog ate my homework", anyone?
There are numerous internet and print analyses of the failings of this book, many reported here on FR.
Do a little search.
LOL. It's going to be great to watch this Bellesiles weasel squirm...
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