Michael A. Bellesiles’s Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture is among the most controversial works of history written in the last century. It was published a year after the Columbine High School massacre and become ensnared in a larger national debate over guns and the Second Amendment. Though many historians praised the book, which went on to win a Bancroft Prize, Bellesiles was accused by many others of fabricating and purposefully misinterpreting evidence. A special investigative committee at Emory University, where Bellesiles was a tenured professor, concluded he had fallen short of the American Historical Association’s standards for professional conduct. The Bancroft Prize for Arming America was rescinded (it remains the only book to have that dubious honor), and Bellesiles resigned from his post at Emory.
Nearly two decades later, Arming America remains a source of controversy. A great number of historians, by no means all of them politically conservative, point to the book as a classic example of contemporary political bias clouding a scholar’s interpretation of the past. Others maintain that Bellesiles was treated unfairly, and some believe he was the victim of a right-wing misinformation campaign.
Daniel Gullotta, a PhD candidate in religious studies at Stanford University, hosts the Age of Jackson podcast (sponsored by Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage), for which he recently interviewed Bellesiles. It is the first time Bellesiles has discussed the controversy publicly since 2010, and the first time he has discussed it at such length since 2003.1
The conversation went on for nearly an hour and a half. Gullotta and Bellesiles discussed the origins of Arming America, the various reactions to his research within academia and the mainstream press, the findings of the special committee at Emory, the infamous flooding of Bellesiles’s office and his painstaking effort to reconstruct his research notes, the awarding and rescinding of the Bancroft, Bellesiles’s alienation from academia, and his decision to leave Emory. Throughout the conversation Bellesiles rebuts his critics point-by-point and stands by the central claims of Arming America. He argues the historical profession failed, during the controversy over his book, to understand the sinister ability of the Internet to prop up a vocal minority, and he sees the weaponization of the Internet against him in the early 2000s as an harbinger of what was to come. He also sees the Arming America controversy as a case study in the failure of peer review; he faults not only his critics but also many of his supporters, who he suggests co-opted Arming America as a political tool rather than engaging with it as a contribution to historical scholarship.
Daniel Gullotta has graciously allowed Contingent to provide a transcript of the interview (edited lightly for clarity) as a public service. The transcript does not, however, do justice to the raw emotion of the interview; if possible, you are encouraged to listen to the podcast episode yourself.
DANIEL: First things first, before we get into the book, I’d love to learn more about yourself—because there’s a lot of people who have said things about you online, but I’d like to get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Tell me about yourself, Michael—who are you? How did you get into history?
MICHAEL: It is kind of you to ask. I’ll answer the second part, by way of religion, how I got into history. I was a bartender in my 20s and thereafter, and I traveled widely and was often struck with the wide diversity of religious faiths I encountered, almost all of which thought they adhered to the one true faith—which as a Catholic I knew to be false, because obviously Catholicism is the truth. But the more I studied the issue, the more I became hooked on history. I read widely as a bartender (that’s one of the advantages of that particular job) and when I had to return to the United States in 1981 because my mother was ill, I decided to apply to graduate school, the University of California. My initial dissertation proposal was to study the theological and social origins of the Moral Majority, but I was assured by no less an authority than Jack Diggins, a wonderfully brilliant intellectual historian, that evangelical participation in politics was but a passing fad of no real historical significance. So I turned instead to the origins of religious diversity on the 18th-century frontier, and studied thereafter with Dr. Christine Heyrman. Wonderful experience. I loved graduate school. I enjoyed, as I discovered, teaching, which is not something I initially expected. And that is how I got into history.
DANIEL: And what university was this again?
MICHAEL: University of California at Irvine, in Southern California. And when I was there it was a young university, a very exciting history department. I took an amazing class with Jonathan Wiener—year-long course on historical theory—completely opened my eyes to the profession in a way I never had previously understood. Like so many people who are enthusiastic about history, I’m afraid I saw it as essentially a chronicle of facts. (How exciting to read about the Civil War again, how exciting to read about the Roman emperors!) But this was a whole different view of history. This is one that saw it as having deep social meanings and relevance to our daily lives. I think that between Professor Wiener’s and Professor Heyrman’s courses, I became a lifelong adherent to the historical profession.
DANIEL: And as someone who enjoys their whiskey and scotch, do you have a favorite cocktail?
MICHAEL: I do indeed! I’ve actually won a few prizes making cocktails as a bartender. My favorite is one I call Solidarity—solidarity between the United States and France—which consists of French liqueurs and my favorite American vodka, which is California Citrus out of Oakland, California, from the St. George Distillery, it is a light and refreshing drink. But I will also say I used to be a bartender in Scotland and scotch is my go-to drink.
DANIEL: Good man. I’m a Glenfiddich man myself, but I also say that as a grad student.
MICHAEL: I’m more the Balvenie, I love that particular scotch. It’s also a beautiful distillery, which you should visit.
DANIEL: I say, and in terms of cocktails, I’m very plain and I like an old-fashioned. But I liked them before Mad Men made them cool.
MICHAEL: That is a drink which you can play with in all sorts of interesting ways. (And I don’t mean to get too far off-subject.) But some time try taking one of those little flambé torches to a pineapple rind and putting that in the old-fashioned. It’s an incredible flavor.
DANIEL: So you graduate with your PhD from the University of California, Irvine. How do you end up at Emory?
MICHAEL: That’s where I got a job! You may know that often when you’re a recent PhD, you don’t get to choose where you go. I sort of saw myself working at a large public university, and my first job was at UCLA, but it was a contractual position where I was teaching the US history survey. I was there for two years, and then I got a tenure-track job at Emory, so that’s where I went.
DANIEL: Still though, to be at that stage of your career and to end up at Emory. I mean, I know scholars who would shove their friends overboard for a job like that these days.
MICHAEL: Well, thank you. As far as I know, I’m the only one to ever win the two top prizes from the Journal of American History. I won their graduate article award and “best article of the year” award, and I think that probably helped Emory decide to hire me.
DANIEL: So you’re at Emory, and Emory being a respected, fairly large research school, you can kind of go in a lot of different directions. So why the direction of Arming America? How did you get into guns?
MICHAEL: Yes. Well, it was never my intention. I had, at the time, long been interested in firearms, and I enjoyed target and skeet shooting, which I did often; I owned and own several guns. But approaching it as a subject was an unintended accident. I was studying probate records on the 18th-century frontier with a completely different project in mind, it would’ve been my second book, and it hit me one day that I was not seeing many guns, though everything I read indicated that gun ownership was, and I put this in quotation marks, “universal.” I saw that phrase over and over again in the literature, and I began looking elsewhere for guns. But everywhere I looked deepened the mystery for me. Militia and military records were packed with complaints that few recruits had guns or any experience with them. The militia was subject to mockery in the contemporary literature, debates in Congress and state legislatures repeatedly return to the need to acquire firearms, and every military conflict in American history up through the Civil War began with a crisis of a firearm shortage. But most telling for me was a simple fact that I came upon—it should be well known—which is that there was not a single gun manufacturer in the United States until the federal government set up the Springfield armory in the 1790s. So I just wanted to know what was going on. Why did historians all repeat this story that the United States is a gun culture from its beginning? And what might the truth be, based on contemporary records?
DANIEL: I just want to jump in there because you’ve used the phrase already, and it’s one of those phrases that a lot of people in book reviews questioned or took issue with or wanted to probe deeper: “gun culture.” What do you mean by gun culture, just to help clarify for my listeners who may be unfamiliar?
MICHAEL: That’s a very good question. And a shorthand is: what we have now is a gun culture. A gun culture is one in which firearms are generally idealized. They are seen as a positive good which improves one’s way of life. They are celebrated in the various modes of popular literature, and other aspects of culture depending on the technology. They appear in many aspects of life—people own them. So we could speak, for instance, of a car culture in the same way, in the United States and much of the 20th century where cars were celebrated. So I was looking back in the, as it turned out, the first century of the United States to see—were guns celebrated? Were they part of the daily life of the American people? Did people own them and use them? Were they interested in them? So that’s sort of what I meant by gun culture.
DANIEL: I suppose it’s time to get into the weeds a bit. But before we do, I’m giving you the floor, Michael, to give your elevator pitch. Because a lot of people have described on Twitter what your book was about, and I noticed in your response pamphlet to the 2003 re-edition, you spend a couple of pages trying to say that “I never said this, this is not what the book is about, etc., etc.” So you’ve got the floor. What’s the elevator pitch? What is your book about? What is the core thesis of Arming America?
MICHAEL: Okay, we’re in an elevator. Quite simply, America’s gun culture did not exist at its founding, but developed with the expansion of the gun industry, becoming fixed in our society with the Civil War. That’s it.
DANIEL: Damn, that is an elevator pitch.
MICHAEL: We’re now at the second floor; I can expand on that, but that in its essence is what my book argues. And all the evidence, as I understand it, in each chapter is demonstrating that core point.
DANIEL: Well, this leads me into the next question—and the uncomfortable one, that I just have to rip the Band-Aid off. Plainly put, Michael, do you still stand by Arming America even after everything that’s happened?
MICHAEL: Absolutely.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, if you didn’t, then I suppose we’d end the interview here or go into other stuff.
MICHAEL: Well, you might ask me for further explanation. I absolutely stand behind the book.
DANIEL: I wanted to take a step back, because before there was a book there was an article, which was the JAH article that, if I’m not mistaken, that is the springboard to Arming America.2 So could you talk about the article a bit more first, to help contextualize for my listeners who may not know what’s going on and trying to follow the timeline. So you look at the probates, you feel like there’s something fishy and things aren’t matching up from your understanding about gun ownership and things like that. So what happens next?
MICHAEL: Really fine question. That article for the Journal of American History, I saw as a challenge to the historical profession. There was this anomaly, that I felt existed, between our agreed-upon mythology of the American gun culture in early America and this whole notion of universal gun-ownership, and what the historical record showed. And in the article, I tried going through a number of different kinds of records, ranging from probate (which captured everyone’s attention, of course), legal records, military/militia records, homicides (what weapons were used in murder cases?), popular culture (how did books treat guns and those who use guns?). Was it an issue that we can find pursued in the popular press? How about the hunting magazines; the hunting magazines, usually called field-and-stream magazines prior to the Civil War were very popular and influential—what was their attitude towards firearms? And I saw my article as very tentative, as throwing out these questions and hoping that other historians would become interested, and that we would start a more, shall we say, collective effort to get at the truth of the role of firearms in early American history. That was my intention.
DANIEL: If I’m not mistaken you received the “best article of the year” award for that article.
MICHAEL: That’s correct.
DANIEL: It’s interesting to me because the Yale Law Journal—I’m trying to think of the guy who wrote the write-up about everything—he said it was interesting that some people immediately were really drawn into this, but others weren’t—at different conferences.3 So I wonder if there was a siloing effect where some historians weren’t talking to each other—not so much, like, taking you to task but professionally dissecting as we do at conferences and in print. So I was wondering if some of this could have been assuaged if we weren’t as siloed.
MICHAEL: I think that’s a really fine way of putting it, because I was surprised when I gave papers at conferences of different aspects of my research, which— After I wrote the article, of course, I decide to expand it into a book and look more closely at a number of different kinds of materials, and I would give papers at conferences in different aspects of it. And I was disappointed that it didn’t inspire more discussion and more, how do I put this, more academic criticism. And I mean that in its purest form, where one asks good questions, suggests alternative materials, alternative readings of the material. I often received positive commentary, but it didn’t go anywhere. And what really sort of startled me, especially in 1998/1999 when I was finishing up the book, people were telling me, “Don’t publish it. Leave it alone.” And other scholars with whom I spoke about their research in ways that touched upon the subject, told me that they would never publish on firearms, and I didn’t understand that at the time.
DANIEL: But before we get to that, a question we all face as young scholars—after, you know, you’d written your first book at this point, which was published by a university press—a question a lot of people discuss online is, do you do another scholarly monograph for a second book, or do you go trade? So I’m kind of curious, why did you decide to go with Knopf, as opposed to a university press, for Arming America?4
MICHAEL: Because they offered me an advance. I was supporting my family and working very, very hard to make it all work for us financially and here—honestly—here comes Knopf with the offer of a check. Because my initial call was to go with—I won’t tell you which press but there was a university press that I very much wanted to publish with. But honestly, how do you resist the offer of a check at that point in your career, when you’re a young assistant professor (I got tenure in the middle of this process). It was very attractive.
DANIEL: And Knopf is probably one of the most respected mass publishers out there as well.
MICHAEL: Right. Yeah. I will tell you this, and in a way this gets back to what you just said a moment ago: young scholar, just published her first book, thinking about the second book, does she or he go with a university press? I recommend it if possible. And I’ll tell you the simplest possible reason is there will be, I feel it’s safe to say, a much better vetting job done. And hopefully the press will contact scholars in your field who, again, can suggest new areas of research, new directions. It can be a more [time-consuming] experience, a less profitable experience, but it will lead, I’m confident, to an even better book.
DANIEL: The consensus on Twitter seems to be university press, university press, then try for a trade press.
MICHAEL: Right. I think that makes perfect sense.
DANIEL: Before we get into the weeds of the book—again, I have an awkward question to ask because the backlash has been really interesting, and there seems to be gradations. And you’ve even noticed this in your response booklet, the gradations of your critics, where some people have basically said, “Well—bad historian, sloppy historian, basically he’s a fool at best.” But there are other people who have gone so far to call you a fraud and just an out-and-out liar. In fact, Dr. Joyce [Lee Malcolm], who I interviewed, she said that if it’s not fraud, it’s pretty damn close. I mean, that’s a pretty grave accusation and one that you take seriously in your responses. How do you respond to such polarizing claims about your work and about you and your person?
MICHAEL: That they’re wrong. May I take a moment to unpack this issue?
DANIEL: Yeah sure, mic’s yours.
MICHAEL: Alright, thank you. The controversy arose because seventeen years ago, there was a flood in Bowden Hall at Emory University in Atlanta, which severely damaged the offices of numerous professors in the history and philosophy departments, including mine. Most of the original notes for my book Arming America were destroyed in that flood. And within days, opponents of the book picked up on this loss to argue that I had never conducted the research supporting three paragraphs in the book that concern probate records. Now, I think the reason they picked on the probate records is because those are the most obscure of all the materials I use, that pretty much require you to go to the individual archives in order to examine them. It’s not something that could easily be verified by going to a good research university library. Emory then appointed a special committee of investigation to look into the charges. That committee acknowledged that I had in fact conducted the research in the archives listed in the book, but they criticized my record-keeping as archaic, for relying on paper rather than the new computer-based systems. They also criticized me for my approach, for including the probate records of the poor, and they criticize my book as, to quote, “thesis-driven.”
Let me give you three quick examples of what they said. I was able to recover one-quarter of my probate material from my notes and put it on the Web. The committee acknowledged this fact, but they faulted my reliance on paper and pencil rather than a computer database. The committee wrote that I clearly examined the probate records I listed, but they criticized me for including the records of very poor people who owned very little. This latter criticism makes no sense to me, since my goal was to examine gun ownership in the entirety of American society, not just among the prosperous. The committee also noted that I had done extensive research in military archives, feeling the need to quote one archivist as stating that I was there often, but that he didn’t like me. (I still don’t understand why they felt the need to include that gratuitous dig.) Now they are correct that I relied on paper and pencil rather than a computer database. I was slow to acquire knowledge of modern technology, and that is something which every historian who wrote prior to the 1990s was guilty. So I definitely was not up to speed on that technology.
The committee’s notion that a work of history should not be thesis-driven strikes me as completely remarkable, as I cannot think of a single significant work of scholarship that is unstructured by a compelling thesis. Even textbooks are organized by thesis, as they usually reveal in their titles. And I include the work of the members of the committee in this generalization; I know their books and they are thesis-driven. So I understand how it was possible for these criticisms to grow, because the material had been—three-quarters of it, at least, in the case of the probate records—destroyed in this flood. But I really reject the characterization of fraud when this committee, which was highly critical of my work, acknowledged again and again that I had been to every one of the archives I claimed I went to.5
DANIEL: In this sense, it seems like so much of the controversy does revolve around probate records. And it occurred to me that I never actually explained what a probate record was—a lot of my listeners are laypeople. So just to unpack, what is a probate record, and why are they so important to your research, and why are they the center of so much of the controversy?
MICHAEL: Well, first up, probate records still occur. When an individual dies, an executor documents everything left in the estate. Today, we often just generalize; if someone was doing my probate, they would say, “Tons of books.” They wouldn’t identify each by title. But someone writing the probate record in the late 18th, first half of the 19th century, would, by hand, enter into a ledger every item in the person’s possession. You can see—this was in some ways my initial interest in probate records—I was fascinated with what works of theology were being read on the frontier, and they would list every book by title. So you can see what these people at least owned, what they possessed. And so, in theory, if an individual owned a firearm, it would be listed. And probate records would list, “rusted old musket,” or “broken musket,” or “musket in good condition.” These things will be listed, not just simply “gun.” They would usually add some descriptor.
But probate records prior to modern times are subject to numerous problems. And the more research I did, the more convinced I became of these flaws. There were definite class, gender, and race biases, and the work of the executor, the nature of the reporting depended on the executor on his—and it was always a his—on his character and adherence to his task. There are often large gaps in the record-keeping, pages disappeared. They were often very difficult to read, because handwriting norms were not widespread and spelling was absurd (anyone who has read the letters of Andrew Jackson knows that). For these reasons, I only discussed the probate records in three paragraphs in the book. And it’s a big book! Though some critics gave the impression that they [the three paragraphs] form the sum of my evidence—and that, again, is just not true, it is literally three paragraphs. I devote much more time to the military records, the militia records, congressional debates, state legislatures, popular culture, homicides—all of these get much more attention than the probate records.
DANIEL: You’ve said very clearly at the beginning of the interview that you still stand by the book, even in the face of this onslaught. So where do you hold your ground the firmest? What’s the hill you’re still dying on when it comes to the thesis of Arming America?
MICHAEL: Well, thank you for asking. If I may, let me just back up for a second, I may have been a little bit dogmatic in my earlier responses. I want to make clear that I certainly acknowledge errors. I have in the past, I still do. I definitely erred in failing to take the time to learn the use of computer databases for research. I began in 1987, I have done my best to fill that gap in my knowledge. I also at the time acknowledged a couple of specific errors in my research. There was that example of George Washington criticizing the military, which I made sound like an overall criticism of the entire Continental Army, whereas it was about a specific unit. And the research into my footnotes found a few pagination errors. I acknowledge those. Any work of history, I like to think, is going to contain a few errors which, in a spirit of goodwill, we should acknowledge, we should correct, and we should then move on with our research—to move closer to discovering the truth. That said, I know of no research that undercuts any of the main findings of my book. I suspect that Arming America was subjected to the most excruciating scrutiny of any work of history in our lifetimes. Yet other than the probate records, I know of no significant errors uncovered. One can certainly disagree with my interpretation of particular materials. And I welcome that. It is absolutely appropriate, when we read about how many militia inductees show up without any knowledge of firearms, [to debate] what that means. “Could they have been too young?” would be an alternate reading; they had not yet been introduced to the use of firearms. Could it be that they were lying? These are alternate interpretations that one can give to the documentation. But in terms of the material writ large—the militia records, the legislative debates, and on and on, source after source, these have not been questioned.
So allow me to say that it is difficult to imagine the scale of the attack leveled on Arming America—I don’t think that this could have been done to any book other than one on the topic of firearms. Members of the National Rifle Association launched a coordinated paragraph-by-paragraph search for errors. One member of the NRA sent me their email exchanges. They found a total of seven errors in 1,300 footnotes. I certainly found many more than that when I looked. Scholars who have examined the battle over Arming America … generally seem to believe that the controversy was both an indication of the NRA expanding its power to foreclose research into America’s gun culture, an influence that extended [to ending] all gun research by the CDC and the NIH; and as the first use of methods that would later be identified as swiftboating, which was used, as we know, in the 2004 election. The controversy also saw the appearance of a type of online conduct that is now known as trolling. Several of these trolls attempted to find fault with my next two books, but could not locate any errors. I’m happy to say that these efforts were not repeated with my last two books.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that Arming America was published about a particular topic at a particular time in our history, which opened it up to the possibility of denial of scholarship in a way that had never been experienced before. It is because it’s the subject of guns that it attracted this attention—and, because the Web was in these early years of development, that people were not yet aware of the way in which the Web and its ancillaries [could] provide both wonderful opportunities for intellectual development (as with your podcast right now), but it’s also a terrible weapon in the hands of the willfully ignorant. It grants them the power to attack anyone, to reframe fundamental questions, and even, as we can now see, to create alternative realities. I recommend to you Neal Stephenson’s new book Fall, which gives a sense of that frightening future.6 If we could somehow extract Arming America from the politically motivated criticisms, what you would see would be a work of scholarship which has flaws like any other work of scholarship, that has a specific argument like any other legitimate work of scholarship, and that is open to debate like any other legitimate work of scholarship.
DANIEL: So getting into more about the crux of your book, a common question that people ask me when I tell people what your book is about—because it strikes them as counterintuitive—a natural question is, “If guns were rare and hard to get, how the heck did Americans win the American Revolution then?”
MICHAEL: That’s a good question, and of course the answer is, most military historians will tell you, is that it was a close thing. It did, after all, take roughly six years of combat for the Revolutionary forces to win. And it was in many occasions a bloody and brutal conflict. In others it was a matter of clever strategic maneuver, as by Nathanael Greene in the South. But what really matters are the firearms in this context, and if it wasn’t for the French and the Dutch, it is unlikely that American forces would have ever been able to match the British army in the open field of combat. They probably would have had to content themselves entirely with guerrilla warfare. But the French and the Dutch did come through with thousands upon thousands of muskets and artillery pieces and ordinance and the necessary munitions to fire these weapons—starting secretly, as it’s now known, in 1776, but then openly in the early part of 1778. Also, we must not forget that one of the first actions undertaken by the state governments (even before independence was declared) was seizing, wherever possible, militia armories and armories, even belonging to the British military. And on top of that, of course, there are the collections of British firearms after a victory by the Americans over the British. They weren’t as common as one often thinks; but for instance, after Saratoga the American forces were able to collect more than 12,000 muskets from that single battle. And of course, I have never said that no one had firearms; it is just the case that, according to militia records, it was unusual for more than about a fifth of those who showed up for service to have their own weapons.
DANIEL: So those people who did show up with their own weapons, and those people in the colonies and the early republic who wanted a gun, needed a gun, could afford a gun., however you want to put it—how does one get one in the early republic and the colonial period?
MICHAEL: Well, prior to the Revolution one could buy one. They certainly were available, usually in the port cities because they were being imported by ship from Europe. That’s where almost all the firearms in colonial America came from, back to the very founding. There were, of course, gunsmiths capable of making as many, according to their own records, as many as twenty muskets in a year. These gunsmiths were scattered throughout the colonies and they did supply a very small number of specialty firearms. But a true gentleman, such as George Washington, prided himself on acquiring the finest firearms, particularly those made by the French, which were much in demand—and they were very expensive, a single firearm imported from Europe was the equivalent of about a year’s pay for a skilled artisan. So again, it was not something that one would enter into lightly. It was not even the same, for instance, as buying a used car today. It would be more like buying a Tesla.
DANIEL: So in that respect, when we’re talking about gun culture, what does a colonial/early republic gun culture look like? Is there any kind of manliness associated with the gun, or romance associated with the gun? Is there a proto–gun culture if I can call it that?
MICHAEL: I think the answer is that there were, in essence, two strands to the gun culture as it existed—because there certainly was a proto–gun culture in America. One was that of the elite—again, people like George Washington, or perhaps more comically like James Madison, who desperately wanted to be perceived as manly and wanted to enlist and lead a military company during the Revolution. He was our shortest president, a rather small individual, and according to his own account the first time he fired a musket he fell over backwards. So there was the notion that a gentleman knew how to use a firearm and owned a very nice one. Usually they were beautifully decorated, and you can see these in many museums scattered around the United States today.
On the other hand there was a sort of rugged association with the most remote frontierspeople, who were exploring out into the wilds of the Ohio River Valley, to be proficient with firearms—but also with the axe and with the knife. These were the weapons of self-defense on the frontier at this time, and I think that is where you mostly get the masculinization of firearms, is in this association with the pathfinders, with those who were, as I said, the more remote aspects of the American frontier in the 18th century. But you don’t see a lot of that in the literature. Even if you come up to James Fenimore Cooper in the 1820s, he doesn’t so much glorify firearms as he does the axe and the knife. His Natty Bumppo is certainly considered a great shot, but when he Is in combat, he is relying on those two bladed weapons for hand-to-hand combat.
DANIEL: You make an interesting aside in your book about Thomas Jefferson, that Jefferson is a very strong gun enthusiast in the Revolutionary context—and yet he’s not a soldier. I don’t know if you meant that as a snide or not.
MICHAEL: Actually Jefferson was fascinating in this regard, because so much of Thomas Jefferson, as we know, is theoretical. He always sort of had a way of compartmentalizing what he believed should be true and what he actually did. So yes, he was a great enthusiast for Americans adopting a wider use of firearms. And he certainly, as president of the United States, wanted to encourage production at the Springfield armory. And he also promoted the idea of a federal armory in the southern part of the United States, which of course would eventually become Harpers Ferry. But he himself was totally unengaged with firearms. I cannot find any records that he participated in any sort of shooting, even hunting on his rather large estate. This was not a personal interest to him. It was more of intellectual interest.
DANIEL: I believe there’s a reference to him riding around with a gun, but something I find interesting is that Jefferson banned firearms at the University of Virginia.
MICHAEL: Well, yes because like so many people in the late 18th/early 19th century, they perceived students as unreliable. They tended to have small riots constantly. This is true at Oxford in England at the time, student riots. And the idea of students having firearms, when they were just a bunch of drunken louts far too often, was rather terrifying.
DANIEL: Speaking of Jefferson, in the recent literature on firearms, I don’t think most of the debates these days are about gun ownership or gun culture, but they’re—at least in the literature I’ve read on firearms in the colonial period and the early republic—the vast majority of it has to do with slaves, slave patrols, and fighting Indians. Can you speak to that?
MICHAEL: Well, it’s certainly true that the state governments of the southern states wanted to encourage wider use of firearms by their slave patrol, and they devoted a great deal of energy and money to acquiring guns for the slave patrols—specifically because they relied far too long on, shall we say, blunt instruments to control the slaves, and those are not always as effective as a firearm. So I do mention, in several places in Arming America, state legislatures appropriating funds specifically for that purpose. Also, of course, the same would become true, to a much greater degree with the westward expansion of the United States, to combat the native population.
What is sort of intriguing to me is that in the colonial records, it does come up from time to time—and I try to record those instances in Arming America—where the colonial legislatures are hoping to acquire firearms from England or the Netherlands or France, to arm the militia to combat Indians. They’re not always very successful. They often would appropriate the funds, but the British government occasionally negates those purchase orders, which the English government could do, they could override any act of a colonial legislature, because the British government was not enthusiastic about the idea of colonial militias being well-armed. So that is an interesting tension that does exist prior to the Revolution, but both of them relate to the control of either a subject people (the slaves) or one that is desirous of being subjugated or exterminated or at the very least pushed further west (the native population).
DANIEL: We can’t ignore any discussion of firearms in early American history without talking about the Second Amendment.
MICHAEL: That is a fundamental question, isn’t it? This is, of course, probably the most sensitive topic that exists today, because there is an understanding now, that the Supreme Court ruled recently, that this is an individual right, that the question has been settled. It is true though, if one wanted to follow the logic of Justice Scalia and go back to the original intent of the framers of the Bill of Rights, what we would see as a primary concern of that first Congress of the United States (which was responsible for the Second Amendment) is how to better regulate the militia, how to encourage its development, and how to encourage its professionalization. These were all concerns of many members of the first Congress of the United States. There were exceptions; there were others who felt that the militia was entirely a state matter, and that the federal government should have no participation.
Given that context, the exact wording of the Second Amendment, of course, always matters. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It seems to me that the question is often overlooked, because those who read the Second Amendment either focus on the “well regulated” aspect of the first clause, or they focus entirely on the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” clause is “the people.” Who is meant by “the people”? In the context of the 18th century, that first Congress clearly did not intend for “the people” to include those who were not white males, and we may want to even limit that further; because there were legislative acts by the colonial legislatures and by the first state legislatures, and it would continue in practice through the 19th century up to the Civil War, to keep firearms out of the hands of not only slaves but free blacks as well—for the same obvious reason, a terror of slave rebellions. Imagine slaves who could access firearms; even if they themselves could not own them, they could perhaps access them through free blacks or sympathetic whites. And so there was also a class component to who “the people” are, depending on which specific state we are discussing. South Carolina, for instance, truly tried to maintain control of firearms in a way that would not have been recognized in, say, Vermont in their early 19th century. So I do think the context of the Second Amendment is a little bit more complicated than is generally understood, and we should appreciate its limitations as well as its promises. Read today, of course, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” seems to me—and this is just a personal opinion, based on my research and understanding of language—is a rather open offer to the people of the United States to own firearms, within a context of some form of regulation. What that is, is, I would think, entirely up to our legislative bodies and the courts. And the courts have apparently spoken, that any form of regulation must be as minimal as possible. At least that’s my understanding.
DANIEL: As a Jacksonian scholar, one of the criticisms that Arming America got a lot was the lack of de Tocqueville references—particularly the famous de Tocqueville line that “there is not a farmer but passes some of his time hunting and owns a good gun.” Care to respond to Tocqueville’s characterization, which makes it seem that there are a heck of a lot of guns and hunting in the early republic?
MICHAEL: Certainly. I think it’s utter nonsense. Tocqueville, in my opinion, is often prone to ridiculous generalizations. You could read his passages on women in America being among the freest people in the world. You could look at his characterization of slavery, which he tries to avoid as much as possible; his refusal to confront racism; beyond that, his failure to consider anti-immigration sentiment, which is already emerging in the 1830s. But this notion that a farmer would spend half his time hunting is absurd. It’s absurd now, and it was absurd then to an even greater degree, because farming is a highly labor-intensive activity in the mid-19th century. And the notion that a farmer would take off half their time—“I’ll just take Tuesday off and go off hunting”—is ridiculous. And it’s particularly ridiculous because of the nature of most farming in America in the Jacksonian period, which is in well-settled areas, where the forests are quickly being denuded of trees because everyone’s using firewood for heat during the winter. They’re using wood for just about every form of construction. Timothy Dwight talks about this beautifully in his travel accounts in the early part of the 19th century. So I think that’s kind of ridiculous. It’s just not the way that a farmer is going to succeed, is if they’re out pursuing a diminishing number of game. And one can also turn to the hunting magazines of the time to get a notion of how absurd this commentary of Tocqueville’s is, because the hunting magazines are packed with concern that it is becoming more and more difficult to hunt game of any kind, including birds, on the East Coast of American (and by East Coast I’m including the Ohio River Valley as far west as the Mississippi) in the 1820s and ’30s. So I just think Tocqueville is wrong, that he is listening to sources who are telling him sweeping generalizations and he’s recording them in his book.
DANIEL: It is interesting to me that one of your most vocal and early critics, Clayton Cramer, he published recently Lock, Stock, and Barrel: The Origins of American Gun Culture. And he opens with basically saying that he wants to investigate, what is the origin of America’s gun culture? And he basically claims probably the exact reverse of you; that it’s early, that it’s in the colonial period—although there are points where he overlaps.7
MICHAEL: I will say, I haven’t read the book, but if, again, if this was any other topic—at this point, he and I would probably appear together at a conference, we would compare our interpretation of materials, and we’d have what I’m sure would be a very lively and informative discussion. But that cannot happen because the subject is firearms.
DANIEL: Have you heard of The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture?8
MICHAEL: No, I’m afraid I have not.
DANIEL: It was [recently] published by Pamela Haag, who is a PhD from Yale, and she is kind of recalibrating parts of your thesis, that it is the Civil War that basically gave Americans the romance of the gun.
MICHAEL: Yeah. Well I agree with that summary, and I feel very badly for her.
DANIEL: I can tell you in terms of online trolling, the Amazon website is pretty brutal.
MICHAEL: I’m so sorry to hear that. I wouldn’t wish what happened to me on anyone. And I mean, sincerely, anyone.
DANIEL: Having said that, then, taking a step backwards with the online stuff—because, as you know, tracking you down was not easy. I had to do some crazy Google Foo. I also was able to track down—after the flood at Emory, I believe you created a sort of primitive online database, where you were trying to recover your notes. So the website wasn’t up, but I was able to use the Wayback Machine (which is an archiving website) to see your attempt to recapitulate. Could you talk about that process—so, after your notes are lost, and all the hate is coming in, the walls are closing in perhaps—what happens next?
MICHAEL: Well. So, I went through all the pulped paper that they allowed me to—because they removed, they being the university and the people they hired to clean up the mess—I’m afraid I remember this all so well—they removed a great deal of it before I was even allowed back into my office. (And not just me; much of the building, Bowden Hall, had the same experience, many other scholars.) I asked if I could get some of the notepads back; there were some that were on shelves that weren’t too badly damaged. And on those I was able to extract 1/4 of the probate records I’d looked. I looked at—I don’t know the exact, I’m afraid I don’t remember the number at the moment—but I was able to extract those, and I didn’t know how to make a website. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but my daughter showed me a great deal of this, how to get started. And I got another graduate student to assist me to a degree. And I started entering the materials, much as possible, onto this website. I didn’t understand about security; the site was hacked several times, I received viruses in my computer, I had to replace my computers, plural. It was very difficult. It’s like no one wanted to see what I had. I did have this material, and I wanted to recreate what was lost by going back to the archives of the remaining three-quarters and to put it all online. But I’m afraid the university didn’t support me, which is something I deeply regret.
DANIEL: Often in conjunction with the flood of your office, which I think is probably one of the most dramatically juicy parts people like to retell [of] the story—I think the second-most dramatic part people usually [emphasize] when they’re recounting the story, is about the references to books or sources that were destroyed or not existing [thanks to] the San Francisco earthquake and the fire of 1906. I know you responded to some of that in your pamphlet; but for my listeners, could you unpack this and talk to this?
MICHAEL: Certainly. I still remember that morning, walking to my office—I was eating an apple and seeing Bowden Hall surrounded by barriers, with giant vacuum hoses going through the windows, and police officers keeping us all away from the building. According to an article in the Atlanta Constitution, a worker had put a gasket on backwards, which led to the explosion of the pipe in the ceiling, that then flooded downwards. Offices were wrecked, computers were destroyed, books and papers turned into pulp, pictures ripped off the walls by the cascading waters; and I, when I was finally let into my office, discovered that all my records of the roughly 10,500 probate returns that I had examined were a pulpy mess. From that I was, over the next two years, able to extract roughly one-quarter of those records to put online; but it made it very difficult to respond to criticism when I did not have my records. I regret deeply to this day that I had not learned how to use computer databases prior to this point.
But what I did try to do, again, is to put those records online that I did have, and that includes—this was a small, I think it was actually the smallest number of probate records—from a single set I used, were from San Francisco. Now of course the San Francisco records were destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, but some of those records, because of the loose county organization of California in the 1850s (which was when I was looking at them) were stored in what would eventually become Contra Costa County. And so I was able to look at—I believe it was thirty, I can’t remember the exact number—probate records in Contra Costa. They originally were in a courthouse, which is where I read them; they would then move to the Contra Costa Historical Society, where they reside today. That was the sum of that controversy. The records are visible. They can be perused. I was criticized, again, by that committee of investigation for including people who owned very little, the notion being that, once more, those who live in poverty should not be included in our definition of people. I disagree completely.
DANIEL: Besides the committee at Emory University, another interesting event was the William and Mary Quarterly, as it’s known to do with popular and hotly debated books, they decided to have a forum in one of its editions (“Historians and Guns”) and included many scholars of the Second Amendment, of firearms. How did you react to this forum and some of their criticisms?9
MICHAEL: Well, I’m afraid I don’t remember that well, but I do recall that I tried to be as specific as possible in once more addressing the probate records, which everyone wanted to talk about. I think that Jack Rakove raised an extremely important point in his critique of my book, in which he said that I failed to discuss the Second Amendment, which I had no intention of doing; it probably would have been well to have done so in the book. My initial plan was to write a trilogy of books on guns. My next one was going to be on technology of firearms in early America up through the Civil War, to show the enormous contributions American inventors and engineers and made to firearms production. And the third book was going to be on gun laws, and I thought I’d discuss the Second Amendment there. But I think he was correct to highlight the need for a discussion of the Second Amendment in the context of development of a gun culture.
There were also some assertions that my that I could not have read and studied 10,500 probate records over a ten-year period, that this was too daunting a task. I find that [a] ridiculous accusation; it all depends how you use your time and what exactly you’re studying. My efforts with the probate records rather straightforward. I started, as I think I mentioned earlier, by wanting to examine the presence of works of theology in the probate records, and it was only while I was looking for the lists of books (because these probate records often included absolutely everything owned by an individual upon their death) that I was struck with the absence of firearms. Given that, once I decide to focus on firearms, I would look at a probate record, at an inventory list, in its entirety; searching out firearms and recording what was said about the firearms. If it just simply said “a good musket,” I would write that and what its value was. If it said “an old rusted musket,” I would write that and what its value was. There were occasions when the handwriting was so bad I was not certain, and I would make a record of that. I did that over a ten-year period. Again, I don’t find that remarkable.
DANIEL: And you had won the Bancroft by this point.
MICHAEL: Yes.
DANIEL: How did you find out you had won?
MICHAEL: Oh, that was a lovely moment. I was actually giving a talk at Pomona College in southern California, and they called Emory and the history department told then where I was, they called the department—and I think I was actually speaking to the humanities division there—and they called their secretary and they brought me into the office and I got the phone call. My daughter and I jumped up and down and were very excited. That was a lovely moment.
DANIEL: I watched your acceptance speech. It was interesting, in your acceptance speech you talked about the attacks you had received and how you thought it was kind of ironic because you thought, given the trends in the academy, you said that by many standards Arming America was a quite conservative book. Could you talk more about that?
MICHAEL: Yes. Oh yeah. God, thank you for bringing that up. I believe that in many ways, in the context of the scholarship of the 1990s which was going in entirely new directions—postmodernism, the denial of authorial intent, the rejection of the notion of any objectivity in history, and the portrayal of early American whites as essentially mass murderers, genocidal lunatics—to find that, as I believe I did, that for the majority of Americans violence held no charms, and the firearms had no lure for them. I thought that was essentially—it was not my intent—but I thought it was essentially a conservative reading of the nature of early America: that this was a largely pacific people, that acts of violence were committed perhaps either under duress or by particular personalities (I will mention the name Andrew Jackson here), and that for the majority of Americans, they just wanted to go about their daily lives, they were deeply religious, they believed and acted upon their faith. And I was charmed by this version of Americans. It surprised me and delighted me. And I thought it sort of vindicated the Enlightenment vision of the creation of the United States as a nation devoted to the standards of democracy, and the spread of those ideals through peaceful means. But to me, the irony was that it was those who identified themselves as conservative (I no longer believe that they are, I believe they are something completely different), but those who identified themselves as conservative were acting so much in the contemporary context of politics, where liberals are identified with anything negative about firearms and conservatives are the protectors of guns—that they failed to see I was talking about a different century.
DANIEL: If I could do the reverse, then, because so many of your critics—I mean, it’s clear the earliest reviews that are negative come from National Review, Reason, NRA, websites, things like that—if I could then ask, because one aspect of Arming America and its drama is the “liberal bias.” So I was wondering (keeping your own politics aside, or you can inject them as you will) do you think that people basically propelled you into superstardom because your book sort of “owned the cons” as it were? That basically you were used as a weapon against the right, and the right had a target on you because you were being used—am I making sense?
MICHAEL: Yes, absolutely. I think it’s taken me years to come to terms with what happened back in 2001 and ’2. And I think you have correctly identified what happened on a personal level to me, because I identified myself as a Burkean conservative at that time. I was a registered Republican. I was a supporter of what I conceived to be individual gun rights, and my initial interpretation of the Second Amendment was entirely—not quite exactly what the NRA argues, because I do think the phrase “well regulated” has some meaning in the Second Amendment—but I thought of myself as conservative in a certain way, a strand of conservatism which is no longer in fashion. And I do think that people in the academy—with whom I had often disagreed over what was back then called political correctness, over post-modernism, over critical studies—these are people I had uniformly disagreed with and got in debates with, they’re the ones I expected to attack the book as not defining culture in a properly modernistic way, or as trying to rehabilitate the founders of the United States as a better people than they actually were. I think they saw value in the book as a support for a political position in the early 21st century, which was never my intention.
DANIEL: So I guess that leads well into my next question, which I can remodel it—will you surprised by all the backlash, but equally were you surprised by all the praise?
MICHAEL: Yes. And I still am. Both. I truly expected this book to be read almost entirely by scholars. And if one would read it—again, try to read it as though it were about something other than guns, today—I hope you would see a work of thorough scholarship. Not very dramatic, not anyway sexy, and perhaps if you wanted to criticize it you could even use a word like “plodding,” which one of my brothers called it. And I understand why. I tried to cover the evidence as well as I could. And I expected scholars to read the book, I expected a scholarly debate to follow, which means slow. It takes years to really unpack some of the ideas. I think here of actually my favorite work of American history, Edmund Morgan’s American Freedom, American Slavery. I think that is a beautiful work of scholarship. And I know that it took a decade before people really engaged with what he was saying in that book. And I kind of expected that response; I hoped for that response. I hoped scholars would take it seriously, and that more scholars, who could write better than I did, would find ways of popularizing and expanding upon some of the specifics in my book. I just saw it as the beginning of a discussion among historians.
So yes, I was surprised by the praise. I was completely unprepared for not just the criticism but the form of the criticism. It changed so many aspects of my life, my core beliefs and perception of people, having my daughter pick up the phone at home to hear a barrage of expletives. Words fail me to this day—who would do that?
DANIEL: How did you find out that the Bancroft had been rescinded?
MICHAEL: They did not contact me. I was at home making dinner with my daughter, and a reporter from the New York Times called and asked me for a response. I had no idea.
DANIEL: If I could push, what happened? How did you feel?
MICHAEL: [Pauses.] Sorry, hang on.
DANIEL: It’s okay, we can go somewhere else if you wish.
MICHAEL: No no no, it’s okay. I would rate it one of the, probably after the death of my mother the worst moment of my life.
DANIEL: So you have tenure, and you still stand behind the book, and you’re working to answer your critics and produce a re-edition. Why, if I can be blunt, why don’t you just say fuck you and stay at Emory?
MICHAEL: [Laughs.] You’re a stronger person than I am. Many people, friends have asked me that. I just could not go on in academic life. I loved teaching, I had devoted myself to Emory, I volunteered for everything, I served seven years as undergraduate director, I founded two programs at the college. I was always there for prospective students. I served on every committee they asked me to serve on. Emory totally failed me. The college, as I mentioned, did not offer to assist me in recreating the scholarship lost in the flood. It did not stand behind me. That broke me. And far worse was responses from colleagues I considered friends. The moment I decide to leave—I know the exact moment—I was standing outside my office when someone who had been over to my house many times, who I thought was a good friend, came up to me and told me he had seen so many criticisms of me on the Web, that he had to believe and I’m quoting him, that where there was smoke there is fire.
And again, the naivety of people toward the Web back in 2001 and ’2 is perhaps now difficult to understand—that he would think that just because there was stuff on the Web, that that indicated there was truth, is shocking. I come from a working-class background; in our world friendship is about loyalty, we stand with one another. I was staggered when he said that to me, and I realized that I was in the wrong place.
DANIEL: Do you regret writing it?
MICHAEL: Yes.
DANIEL: Wow. That’s—
MICHAEL: Yeah, I mean, I certainly have some mixed feelings. And again, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. I know that if I had written yet another biography of Jefferson or Jackson, that I would still be a full professor and happily anonymous. I would prefer that. I prefer my anonymity. And I would have loved to continue to teach. But I believe, I do believe the truth will set you free, and I know for a fact that I have learned so much from the experiences surrounding Arming America, of which I would otherwise have remained ignorant. And I know that it has made me a more empathetic person, for which I’m very, very glad. I prefer the person I am today to the one I imagine I would have been without the personal crisis that occurred because of Arming America. It’s probably a truism that we all would prefer to miss the pain while knowing we grow from our ordeals.
DANIEL: Talk me through, because then Knopf also rescinds its offer to republish the book and the edition. I’m holding in my hand right now is by Soft Skull Press which was published in 2003. What was it like going back and re-tweaking the thing and producing your response pamphlet? What was that process like?
MICHAEL: Well, it was [a] painful and positive experience, because it forced me as a scholar to reconsider what I had written. I would have preferred that the criticisms, again, were made in a spirit of goodwill, because I would have preferred to respond in that way. But it was very positive to go through the book with a fine-tooth comb, to look at every footnote again, to make sure that the pages in the footnotes were all right. I didn’t want any errors anywhere, and I do it with all my books now. I am intensely cautious, with everything I write, to make sure there are not even typographical errors in the final product. I think that’s very positive.
It was painful because I thought so much was so insane. I was accused of insulting the founding fathers; I thought I did the opposite. I was accused of Zionism, I don’t even know where that’s coming from. I was accused of being a fraud and as you quoted earlier, apparently I still am. And since I know what I did, since I made sacrifices, really enormous personal sacrifices to do this research, to spend time away from my daughter in order to write this book, it hurts. And it hurt then. But I thought it was something that absolutely I needed to do, and then to move on.
DANIEL: In terms of moving on, what has your post-Arming America life been like? How does Michael keep his days these days? Although it’s been a long time, so—
MICHAEL: No, it’s actually a fair question. And I’ve had three jobs at the same time. I went back to bartending, which I love and recommend to any graduate students seeking to supplement income. I taught at many universities and colleges through the good offices of friends in the university, because I do love teaching—but I did not participate, I only taught. And I worked as an editor for a—and I don’t want, I try not to mention anyone so they don’t get hate mail to0—but I worked as an editor for a prominent educational press. I retired from teaching two years ago, I retired from editing last year, and I’m retiring from bartending on my mother’s birthday this year.
DANIEL: And you’ve written two other books in the proceeding years about military history.
MICHAEL: I’ve written, actually, I think more like four. And I edited a lot though my name doesn’t always appear. I wrote 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently. I wrote A People’s History of the U.S. Military which is the experience of common soldiers in American history. I should have mentioned, I also was the director of the Veterans’ Institute of New England, which was a non-profit educational institute, and I got to know basically the last third of that book—I’m very proud of that book, People’s History, the last third of it is entirely people I knew, interviews and such. I wrote a book on conspiracies, conspiracy theories, which was published in France by Montpellier, and my next book—I always have a new book project—my next book, Inventing Equality, is being published by St. Martin’s Press and is due out, I think, by the end of the year.10
DANIEL: Oh, I’m curious, what’s Inventing Equality about?
MICHAEL: I’m so glad you asked. [Laughs.] It’s a study of the development of the concept of legal equality in the years from 1850 to 1877 at the end of Reconstruction, obviously, the Reconstruction amendments which put the concept of legal equality into the Constitution. How did it get there? Why was it written in the form it was? And what was its impact?
DANIEL: Interesting! Just to wrap things up, suppose somebody was browsing Amazon or in a used bookstore or in a library, and they came across Arming America, and they were struck by the cover, struck by the title, and they were interested—and given the recent tragedies of mass shootings, I can imagine people—I mean, it’s one of the things that provoked me to do these episodes, was thinking about this book more and more, because I first heard about your book in David Blight’s 19th-century seminar at Yale, and it made me go into the library and pull it out. So I was wondering, suppose you could appear as an apparition if someone was perusing it and picking it up in a bookstore or a library or on the Web, what would your apparition say to them? What would you want them to know about the book before they go into it—or if people want to read it after listening to this podcast, what’s your pitch, maybe words of warning? What would you want them to know before they cracked open Arming America?
MICHAEL: Read it with an open mind, and without yet exploring the criticisms of it. Judge first for yourself, and then explore the criticisms. Try not to tell anyone you’re reading it, because you may get some hostile responses. And hopefully do some research for yourself; look into the source materials, which are rich and full. And that’s where life is, is in the source documents. And if I may quote the ending of the book as I remember it, “Nothing in history is immutable.” Cultures change over time. Ours can too.
Additional Resources
Journal of American History: Michael Bellesiles, “The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760–1865” (1996)
William and Mary Quarterly forum: “History and Guns” (2002)
Yale Law Journal: James Lindgren, “Fall From Grace: Arming American and the Bellesiles Scandal” (2002)
Emory University: “Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles” (2002)
Bellesiles’s rebuttal ramphlet, Weighed in an Even Balance (2003)
Plagiary: Clayton Cramer, “Why Footnotes Matter: Checking Arming America’s Claims” (2006)
Profiles of Bellesiles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times (2010)
Age of Jackson Podcast: Daniel Gullotta’s interview with Joyce Lee Malcolm, a prominent Bellesiles critic (2019)
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- Tom Bartlett, “Michael Bellesiles Takes Another Shot,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 3, 2010; Patricia Cohen, “Scholar Emerges from Doghouse,” New York Times, Aug. 3, 2010; Michael A. Bellesiles, Weighed in an Even Balance (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2003).
- Michael A. Bellesiles, “The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760–1865,” Journal of American History 83 (Sept. 1996): 425–55.
- James Lindgren, “Fall From Grace: Arming American and the Bellesiles Scandal,” Yale Law Journal 111 (June 2002): 2195–2249.
- Bellesiles’s first book was Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993).
- For the report, see Stanley N. Katz, Hanna H. Gray, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Report of the Investigative Committee in the Matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles” (Emory University, 2002).
- Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (New York: HarperCollins, 2019.
- Clayton E. Cramer, Lock, Stock, and Barrel: The Origins of American Gun Culture (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2018).
- Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
- The forum was published in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (Jan. 2002): 203–68. It included an introduction by Robert A. Goss, pp. 203–4; Jack N. Rakove, “Words, Deeds, and Guns: Arming America and the Second Amendment,” 205–10; Gloria L. Main, “Many Things Forgotten: The Use of Probate Records in Arming America,” 211–16; Ira D. Gruber, “Of Arms and Men: Arming America and Military History,” 217–22; Randolph Roth, “Guns, Gun Culture, and Homicide: The Relationship between Firearms, the Uses of Firearms, and Interpersonal Violence,” 223–40; and Michael A. Bellesiles, “Exploring America’s Gun Culture,” 241–68.
- 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently (New York: The New Press, 2010); A People’s History of the U.S. Military: Ordinary Soldiers Reflect on Their Experience of War, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (New York: The New Press, 2012); Conspiracy and Consent in International Perspective: Historical and Cultural Representations, co-edited with Larry Portis and Joseph Zitomersky (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditérranée, 2017).