Arming America is the only book to win a Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious award for writing American history, and then have it revoked. Historians remain divided on the scandal; some think Bellesiles was a fraud, others think he was a sloppy scholar in over his head, while still others think he was a political martyr. It is nearly a rite of passage for young historians when they learn about the scandal, often in a graduate seminar, where they delight in the bizarre, almost biblical details — the flood, the earthquake, even a cameo from Charlton Heston.
A month ago, after nearly a decade of silence and not having addressed the controversy at such length since 2003, Michael Bellesiles spoke. The former Emory University professor stands by Arming America and blames a right-wing disinformation campaign for his downfall; moreover, he does not think historians have fully grappled with what may yet befall earnest scholarship. The critics are far from convinced, and they see Bellesiles and his support within the academy as symbolic of everything that's wrong with the historical profession.
First, a primer on the original controversy. In the 1990s, when Michael Bellesiles was at Emory, he became interested in probate records from the American frontier in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. When someone died, a probate record was produced, listing the deceased person's estate. Bellesiles was originally interested in what books people left behind (since the inventories often listed individual titles), but he was sidetracked by the realization there were relatively few guns listed in the probate records, and if they were listed they were often described as old, rusted, or broken.
This was at odds with what Bellesiles would have guessed about the American frontier. And it made him wonder how much of what he had assumed about guns in early American life was actually myth.
Bellesiles published his findings in the Journal of American History in 1996, on the strength of which he secured a contract with Knopf to expand the article into a general-audience trade book. The argument was, in short, that Americans were not especially interested in guns until the Civil War. Bellesiles claimed that, during the early years of the United States, guns were relatively hard to come by and few Americans owned them. Gun homicides were rare, and guns did not even show up much in popular culture. Only with the beginning of mass gun production in the mid-19th century and the proliferation of guns during the Civil War did Americans develop what Bellesiles calls a modern "gun culture."