Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and by Peter Charles Hoffer

Author:Peter Charles Hoffer [Hoffer, Peter Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781586485948
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2007-07-03T06:00:00+00:00

Lane was particularly impressed by the probate data.41

The only similarity between the favorable reviews and the unfavorable ones was the authors’ obsessive use of gun metaphors. Criticism of the book first appeared in conservative journals, newspapers, and at first was the work of gun control opponents. Cramer’s response was predictable, and his venue, The National Review, a conservative opinion journal, seemed an obvious place to debunk Bellesiles. Over time, however, other negative reviews began to surface whose authors were academics publishing in places that other academics could not ignore. For example, Robert Churchill, a young historian whose field was the early militia, and Joyce Lee Malcolm, a senior historian, published critical assessments in Reviews in American History and the Texas Law Review, respectively. They not only thought the analysis flawed, they doubted the validity of the research.42

By May 2001, the main tenor of the reviews had shifted from the admiring to the critical. Daniel Justin Herman’s review, in H-Pol, suggested the direction the public debate was beginning to take. “There’s been a count, there’s been a recount, and there will be recounts of recounts, no doubt, yet no clear winner has emerged.” Herman admitted that the book was “polarizing” and that the magnetic field conformed to the poles of the gun control issue. He judged the book “both mighty and flawed.... Given Bellesiles’ recitation of gun censuses, gun manufacturers’ reports, militia and army records, and probate records, Arming America seems practically, uh, bulletproof.” (To his credit, Herman winced at his own gun metaphor.) But “able and reputable critics” had convinced Herman that something was wrong with Bellesiles’s probate figures. What was more, “his use of anecdotal evidence was even more questionable for being half analyzed”—that is, Bellesiles would quote or cite a passage that made no mention of guns and thus seemed to support his view, while observations of the abundance of guns and Americans’ skill in using firearms could be found a few pages away in the same source. Overall, Herman considered the argument too thesis driven and too hyperbolic in its claims, and Bellesiles too unwilling to admit anything of his opponents’ case. In the end, Herman found the book “generated questions” and “issued challenges” for further research—two of the polite death notices that reviewers pass on books that are mightily flawed. The tide was now running against Bellesiles and the undertow was fierce.43

The hit-or-miss quality of the H-Net exchanges and the dueling book reviews left many readers bewildered, and thus everyone welcomed news that Bellesiles and other experts in the field would be joining combat in a special forum in the William and Mary Quarterly, scheduled for the winter of 2002. Richard Bernstein, writing to H-Law, suggested that “all interested parties ought to wait for the appearance next month of the January 2002 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, which will feature a full and careful examination of Arming America, as well as a response by Prof. Bellesiles.” The Quarterly is the premier journal in early American history.

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