Amusing Discovery

Last night, I attended the start of the semester meeting of the new Department of Culture, History, and Political Science into which history faculty have been merged.  The college hired the new department chair out of Ohio -- and the Bellesiles matter came up when we were discussing the U.S. History texts that we use for the survey class.

It turns out that our new chair received his Ph.D. from Emory University, and was actually there at the time the scandal came up, so he knew who I was, and the part I played in the Bellesiles downfall.  He was also a student of Bellesiles at one point, and found it amusing that Bellesiles made a big point in that class of discussing the problems of fraud by historians -- cases where historians had falsified sources.  And this was about the time that Bellesiles was producing the Arming America fraud!

Always Nice to See You Will At Least Be a Footnote to History

 1/14/24 American Conservative article how plagiarism and other academic no-no ruless are selectively enforced depending on whether you can claim victimhood and progressive team membership.

Sadly, labeling critics as “bad faith” actors has become a default weapon of its own for burying factually accurate revelations of academic misconduct by figures on the political left. We saw this same defensive pattern emerge in the early 2000s controversy around Michael Bellesiles, then a history professor at Emory University. Bellesiles’s book, Arming America, skyrocketed to academic fame primarily because its historical narrative bolstered present-day arguments for firearms regulation. When researcher Clayton Cramer uncovered evidence that Bellesiles falsified his sources and made unsupported claims from nonexistent historical records, academia circled the wagons. The American Historical Association passed a resolution depicting Bellesiles as a victim of harassment, and numerous scholars attacked Cramer as a “bad faith” critic with ties to the firearms lobby. They only changed their tune when the evidence became impossible to ignore, resulting in Bellesiles’s resignation and the revocation of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book.

Where Trusting Liars Gets You

A few years back, the 9th Circuit ruled against the Second Amendment protecting an individual right, relying on work by a then rising star of antigun historical research.  When it was pointed out to the court that Bellesiles was in a tailspin for fraud, they removed the reference to Bellesiles, but left a bogus misquote from him in the decision. I was revisiting this issue for a review of Pamela Haag's 2015 repackaging of Bellesiles, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, and I noticed that Bellesiles not only quoted out of context Washington's letter to John Adams, but the letter was to James Madison!  Not only a false quote, but failing even to get he recipient right.

History Repeats Itself, Or At Least, Historians Repeat Each Other

A new paper.  Please read and comment.

Bellesiles’ Arming America Redux:
Does The Gunning of America Rewrite American History to Suit Modern Sensibilities?

Abstract:      

Fifteen years ago, Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America was the darling of antigun intellectuals because it created an entirely new perception of the American relationship to guns. It implicitly argued for a much narrower reading of the Second Amendment, one compliant with an America (then) that hated guns and did not own them and an ivory tower today that hates guns and the Americans who bought at least 23 million guns in 2015. Questions were soon raised about the accuracy of the statistics in Bellesiles’ articles and book, and then his honesty about where he researched documents, his widespread alteration of quotes, and his citations to documents that directly refuted his claims. He rapidly went from tenured professor of history at Emory University to bartender, picking up some unprecedented punishments along the way for fraud. A new book, Pamela Haag’s The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (Basic Books, 2015) makes (by the author’s own admission) many of the same arguments and demonstrates the dangers of unexamined assumptions. Judges and their clerks need to be aware that while the future is known; the past changes at the whim of careless historians.

Peer Review

 I have some serious gripes with peer review.  It brought us wonder such as the 1996 Michael Bellesiles artickle that started the entire Arming America fraud.  Peer review means that ideas that conform to the status quo or that meet political needs of the elite are more likely to get published.  In the scuiences, the problem has been severe for a long time.  This article from Journal of Royal Society of Medicine:

There may even be some journals using the following classic system. The editor looks at the title of the paper and sends it to two friends whom the editor thinks know something about the subject. If both advise publication the editor sends it to the printers. If both advise against publication the editor rejects the paper. If the reviewers disagree the editor sends it to a third reviewer and does whatever he or she advises. This pastiche—which is not far from systems I have seen used—is little better than tossing a coin, because the level of agreement between reviewers on whether a paper should be published is little better than you'd expect by chance.1

That is why Robbie Fox, the great 20th century editor of the Lancet, who was no admirer of peer review, wondered whether anybody would notice if he were to swap the piles marked `publish' and `reject'. He also joked that the Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. When I was editor of the BMJ I was challenged by two of the cleverest researchers in Britain to publish an issue of the journal comprised only of papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. I wrote back `How do you know I haven't already done it?'"...

Peer review might also be useful for detecting errors or fraud. At the BMJ we did several studies where we inserted major errors into papers that we then sent to many reviewers.3,4 Nobody ever spotted all of the errors. Some reviewers did not spot any, and most reviewers spotted only about a quarter. Peer review sometimes picks up fraud by chance, but generally it is not a reliable method for detecting fraud because it works on trust. A major question, which I will return to, is whether peer review and journals should cease to work on trust."...

The evidence on whether there is bias in peer review against certain sorts of authors is conflicting, but there is strong evidence of bias against women in the process of awarding grants.5 The most famous piece of evidence on bias against authors comes from a study by DP Peters and SJ Ceci.6 They took 12 studies that came from prestigious institutions that had already been published in psychology journals. They retyped the papers, made minor changes to the titles, abstracts, and introductions but changed the authors' names and institutions. They invented institutions with names like the Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential. The papers were then resubmitted to the journals that had first published them. In only three cases did the journals realize that they had already published the paper, and eight of the remaining nine were rejected—not because of lack of originality but because of poor quality. Peters and Ceci concluded that this was evidence of bias against authors from less prestigious institutions." 

When I did an ngram in books.google.com for "peer review," it became apparent that the phrase is really not used until the 1940s and even then rarely.  Can anyone point me to other great frauds besides Bellesiles that survived peer review? 

Declaration of War

I am getting nowhere writing and submitting law review articles about The Gunning of America, so I guess it's time to declare war, and start submitting articles to history journals.  This is an interesting problem.  You can't point out fraud in history journals (as I found out with Bellesiles); they won't even review such articles.  History journals are MUCH more progressive (hard left) than law reviews.  Instead, I am going to point the serious flaw in the Bellesiles/Haag claim that guns were not widely owned before 1848: the enormous number of gunsmiths and gun makers that are present in the records (both primary and secondary sources).  I have a spreadsheet with >3700 gunsmiths/gun makers working before 1840 in America.  I also just started searching the Library of Congress' Chronicling America, which has newspapers from 1690 to 1922, most of them text searchable.  I have already found many hitherto unknown gunsmiths.

Oh and pistols, supposedly not widely present before evil Sam Colt, appear thousands of times; often in fiction or foreign events but I can sample and figure out what percent are factual and in America.

The Problem of Scientific Fraud and How to Get Around It

Scientific American reprinted this article from Nature about a prominent psychologist who has now admitted that at least thirty of his published, peer-reviewed papers were fraudulent, using the word "massive" to describe the scale of it:

Stapel's eye-catching studies on aspects of social behaviour such as power and stereo­typing garnered wide press coverage. For example, in a recent Science paper (which the investigation has not identified as fraudulent), Stapel reported that untidy environments encouraged discrimination ( Science 332, 251-253; 2011).

"Somebody used the word 'wunderkind'," says Miles Hewstone, a social psychologist at the University of Oxford, UK. "He was one of the bright thrusting young stars of Dutch social psychology -- highly published, highly cited, prize-winning, worked with lots of people, and very well thought of in the field."

I looked at the paper in Science that they linked to, and surprise, surprise!  It is one of those subjects that simply because of the language that the abstract uses "victim of discrimination" would certainly be given a pass by the left, who utterly dominates psychology (and most other social sciences):

Being the victim of discrimination can have serious negative health- and quality-of-life–related consequences. Yet, could being discriminated against depend on such seemingly trivial matters as garbage on the streets? In this study, we show, in two field experiments, that disordered contexts (such as litter or a broken-up sidewalk and an abandoned bicycle) indeed promote stereotyping and discrimination in real-world situations and, in three lab experiments, that it is a heightened need for structure that mediates these effects (number of subjects: between 40 and 70 per experiment). These findings considerably advance our knowledge of the impact of the physical environment on stereotyping and discrimination and have clear policy implications: Diagnose environmental disorder early and intervene immediately.

As the article from Nature is careful to point out: this is not one of the articles that is known to be based on fraudulent data.  Unfortunately, as the Bellesiles scandal demonstrated, scholars have a bad habit of turning off their critical thinking skills when what they are reading conforms to what they want to be true.  It is a difficult problem to solve; almost everyone has some tendency to believe that what they want to be true is true.  The only real solution is diversity within the scholarly community.  Academics need to recognize that allowing a wide range of political beliefs within the ivory tower is not just a matter of fairness, but also a matter of making sure that every paper gets examined critically, and that includes by scholars who disagree with the core assumptions of the paper.

Why Peer Review Does Not Mean Much

I have always found that when it comes to history journals, peer review means "conforms to the prejudices and assumptions of the status quo" which is why Michael Bellesiles had no problem getting outright lies published.  Now we see bigger problems.  From August 18, 2015 Washington
Post:

Made-up identities assigned to fake e-mail addresses. Real identities stolen for fraudulent reviews. Study authors who write glowing reviews of their own research, then pass them off as an independent report.

These are the tactics of peer review manipulators, an apparently growing problem in the world of academic publishing.

Peer review is supposed to be the pride of the rigorous academic publishing process. Journals get every paper reviewed and approved by experts in the field, ensuring that problematic research doesn’t make it to print.

But increasingly journals are finding out that those supposedly authoritative checks are being rigged.
In the latest episode of the fake peer review phenomenon, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, Springer, has retracted 64 articles from 10 of its journals after discovering that their reviews were linked to fake e-mail addresses. The announcement comes nine months after 43 studies were retracted by BioMed Central (one of Springer’s imprints) for the same reason.

Very Busy

But I need to take a break every once in a while.  I am writing a rebuttal to Prof. Saul Cornell's "expert declaration" in the challenge to Hawaii's assault pistol and LCM ban.  

It is amazing how his declarations just keep getting worse and worse and Hawaii is paying him $750/hour to produce crap that even just looking up citations shows he is misrepresenting.   

But there is some fun as well.  At one point he claims that were few pistols in the Colonial era, and those were mostly dueling pistols in the hands of wealthy and elite sorts.  (Yes, rampant Bellesiles-ism.)  Of course, I have more evidence proving him wrong on this than I can reasonably use.  Thousands of 1720s through 1760s newspaper articles and ads for pistols.  And archeological digs with pistols and pistol bullets.  And I get paid to do this!

A Wealth of Data

One of the insane tasks that I took on when writing Armed America (2006) was compiling a spreadsheet of all the gunsmiths that I found in primary and secondary sources, working  before 1840, at least in part to refute the Bellesiles/Haag claim of a lack of early gun culture.  I ended up with 2445 entries for which I could establish dates and location.  I started searching a resource that was not available in the 2000s: books.google.com and what an overwhelming wealth.

While revising this chapter, I took advantage of the dramatic expansion of searchable online books and soon realized that examples such as the following have expanded the available data to a level that would enlarge this book dramatically were I to include all: An 1831 request from the War Department to Maj. F.W. Armstrong requests that he repair all the old rifles belonging to the Choctaws, authorizing him to hire “an additional gun-smith” if needed.[1]  Similarly, War Department instructions to Lewis Cass specify maximum wages to be paid to gunsmiths providing repair services to the Indians.[2]

---

[1] Commissary General of Subsistence, Correspondence on the Subject of the Emigration of Indians, Washington: Duff Green, 1835), 2:372-3.

[2] Ibid., 2:848.

The Myth of Early Gun Marketing

Both Bellesiles and Pamela Haag's new book. The Gunning of America, claim that there was really no civilian gun market until the big gun makers like Winchester and Colt created one.  Part of what the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund's research grant is paying for:

Among the pieces of evidence cited by Haag in defense of her claim is that, “A letter book in the archives of Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company reveals detailed, fractious bickering over how many guns the dealers should be expected to ‘push.’”[1]  She points to p. 174 of the Allies letter book.[2]  (Colt used the term “Allies” to refer to what were clearly distributors or wholesaler of Colt products.)  Examination of those pages reveals how Haag’s failure to read in context and her emotional desire to blame gun ownership on the capitalist class has led her astray from the facts.  The reference to “push” is: “We fail to see that the ‘facts’ warrant the closing sentence of the letter therefore do not concede all that is set forth in reference to the ‘Line’.  But as we do not propose at present to discust [sic] the merits and push of the Allies on the goods covered by the agreement, we rest.” [emphasis added][3]  The closing sentence of the letter to which this was a response is: “It is hoped that you will readily accede [sic] to our request, when the fact is conceded that the Line upon which we have the Discount, is not only smaller – but also, that notwithstanding our best efforts the sale of this class of Arms has decreased.”[4] Colt’s desire for its distributors to “push” its product is clearly referring to one particular product line whose sales were decreasing, and therefore the distributors were asking for a better profit margin.

Examination of other correspondence between Colt and its distributors and from Colt during this period suggests that there was no need to “push” the products. “[Proposed contract] [w]ould meet the unanimous consent of the allies & in the long run be more advantageous to the Colt Pat Fire Arms Co- The quantity should be 150 to 175 per month at the outside assorted viz.   22 cal [125]. 32 cal [30] 38 cal [5] 41 cal [15] with privilege of taking more of the larger or less of the smallest if demand required it.”[5]  The bracketed numbers were quantities of each revolver caliber requested per month written above the caliber.  A letter of January 24, 1874 from Colt to the Allies also shows that the quantities of revolvers under discussion, and the hardnosed pricing from Colt, do not suggest of a problem selling Colt revolvers: “[F]or we have between 4 & 5 thousand Pistols on hand and in the works.  The price named to the Allies (5.25 less 8%) is the lowest price we shall quote for them.   We have 1486 New Pocket BL [breech loading] Rim Fire and 408 do [ditto] do [ditto] pistols that we will sell to the Allies at 5.00 Each net 60 days.” [6]  A June 29, 1874 letter from the Allies to Colt: “Please accept this order from each of the subscribers for two hundred OM [Old Model] 7 Shot Revolvers at $2.99 each, weekly for one year.”[7]  Three Allies signed the letter, so this was an order for 31,200 revolvers a year.  On August 22, 1874 Colt confirmed an order from the Allies for “Ten Thousand (10000) new model 7 shot Pistols to be delivered within Twelve months from Sept 1^st/74 at the net price of Five Dollars and Thirty five cents (%.35) each.  The first delivery of 1000 Pistols to be made in November 1874.”[8]  A December 30, 1874 letter to Colt ordered “Five thousand (5000) of the new 30 cal Revolvers.”[9]

---

[1] Haag, Gunning of America,  xv.
[2] Ibid., 408 n.10.
[3] Colt Collection, RG103, business file, box 11A, correspondence, Allies letter book, 1873-1880, from Hugh Harbison to Allies, October 30, 1877, p. 174 of letter book.
[4] Ibid., Willard and Seaver, Sec. [of Allies] to Hugh Harbison, October 17, 1877, p. 173 of letter book.
[5] Ibid., Colt Allies to Colt Patent Fire Arms Co., June 26, 1873, p. 15 of letter book.
[6] Ibid., Hugh Harbison to [illegible], January 24, 1874, p. 22 of letter book.
[7] [Allies] to Colt Fire-Arms, June 29, 1874, p. 25 of letterbook.
[8] Colt Fire-Arms to [illegible], August 22, 1874, p. 31 of letterbook.
[9] Hugh Harbison to Colt Patent Fire Arms, December 30, 1874, p. 39 of letterbook.

I'm Impressed With This Textbook

I didn't have any say over the textbook that College of Western Idaho picked for U.S. History--but wow!  I'm thrilled with it.  James L. Roark, Michael P. Johnson, Patricia Cline Cohen, Sarah Stage, Alan Lawson, and Susan M. Hartmann, The American Promise: A History of the United States, 4th ed. 

Both the textbook, and the Instructor's Manual, show the kind of careful, non-inflammatory discussion of sensitive topics that reflect current scholarship in such areas as Indian diversity, the myth of the noble savage, the complexity of European and Indian relations, and the nature of slavery.  The Instructor's Manual is full of sections that address particular common misconceptions that students are likely to have--and useful and diplomatic ways to get students to understand the complexity of history.

The ACLU probably won't like the discussion of the role of religion in early America, which includes many of the same points that I make here.   And yes, while they never mention Bellesiles' name, or Arming America, they are clearly discussing it on pp. 216-17.  I am a bit disappointed at their careful avoidance of admitting that Arming America was fraud--but they do make it clear that Arming America's claims were clearly and unmistakeably wrong.

I would say that if you are home schooling, and you have a smart high school kid--or maybe a very smart junior high student--this is a pretty decent choice.

Why People Are Anti-Gun

Some people assume that antigunners are driven by police state desires or emotional reactions to the latest tragedy.  Often, it goes much further back.  You probably know that astronaut Mark Kelly is married to Gabby Giffords who was a member of Congress until a psychotic named Loughner shot her among many others.  You probably also know both are active gun banners now.  I am reading his twin brother Scott Kelley's Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery which I am much enjoying.

Scott describes growing up in New Jersey, the son of a police officer:

Sometimes my father's cop friends would come over to our house for parties, and when they got drunk they would pull their guns out.  Once, my father wanted to show off his new gun to his partner, so they decided to use a wooden sculpture I had just made in school as a target.  I had brought it home and showed it proudly to my parents, and I was heartbroken that my dad would blast holes in my artwork. [pp.35-36]

Any guesses how far back his brother's feelings about guns go?

When I first started working at HP in Boise, I put up a Wall Street Journal article outside my cubicle  about the then-developing Bellesiles scandal and my part in exposing it.  A secretary became immediately freaked out, and showed it to my boss, who calmed her down by pointing out that I was an historian.  I talked to her about it later.  Her experience with gun owners was her father who never hunted sober and had a long history of accidental discharges in the house.  And this was an Idaho native!

From reading your comments: Even if Mark Kelley intellectually knows that his father is not a typical gun owner there will be an emotional response that is hard to overcome.  Many years ago, I worked with a guy who had suffered a very Los Angeles experience.  He and wife had just come home, the screen door was closed but not the front door (warm Los Angeles night), and three black guys smashed through the door, tied him up, gangraped his wife and forced him to watch, then stole everything of value and much that was not: their wedding pictures: why?  LAPD took huge numbers of fingerprints but never ran them.  It wasn't a serious enough crime.  Their marriage almost collapsed.

Now intellectually, he knew this was just those three black guys, but when we hired three black guys some months later and they walked into the office, he started to shake.  Irrational?  Yes.  Surprising?  No.  Some traumas preclude reason.

An Unreasonable Request

I am writing a book on gunsmithing and gun making in early America.  I need some methodical people to read through the footnotes and verify that of the source appear in the bibliography.  This is a "posthole" type of history; the sort of highly detailed history that only a university press will publish because the only commercial market will be gun collectors.  This gives you the chance to read it first.
Yes, this is part of demolishing Haag's new book before it starts appearing in antigun legal briefs and then court decisions.  Since Haag's book of lies is based on Bellesiles' "scholarship," I am demolishing any last defenders or disciples of his as well.  Take no prisoners!

I will be adding a chapter or two later on the role that gunsmithing and manufacture had in creating the modern world by way of machine tooling.

If interested in this absurdly boring task, email me at clayton AT claytoncramer.com.

UPDATE: I have two people working on this now.  That should be enough.

Can You Find The Article From Which This Graph Came?

This page contains a very good New York Times article about the centuries old drought history of California, and this graph:

Now there is a source, but after the Bellesiles matter, I like to look things up and verify the source.  I cannot find a article by E.R. Cook that contains such a graph, although I have found many articles by Cook about North American historical drought.  Can you find it?

Thanks!  Here. E.R. Cook. et al., "North American drought: Reconstructions, causes, and consequences," Earth-Science Reviews, Volume 81, Issues 1–2, March 2007, Pages 93-134

My librarian downloaded the full article.

The original graph, obviously modified a bit.

The essential fact is unchanged; western North America is ahistorically wet; droughts coincide with the Medieval Warm Period.

The Pseudo-Intellectuals Are Getting More Stupid As They Get More Powerful

From Skeptic.com:

The Hoax
The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.

This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we’ve archived it.)

The names were fake; their organization was fake; their argument was overtly nonsense; but it passed peer review!  I used to get upset that peer-reviewed history journals would not publish my work.  Now, it's a point of pride.  Michael Bellesiles' first fraud was published in the Journal of American History, a peer-reviewed journal.

Academia is in free fall.

I Have Seen a Lot of Evidence That the Standards for Federal Judges Are High Enough

 Willingness to accept expert declarations that fail the Bellesiles Test (do the cited aources actually exist? Do they say what the expert claims?) What are clearly ends-driven decisions.

Among the most disappointing was a district judge in Fresno who refused to hear expert testimony about the history of domestic violence disqualification in the colonial period, insisting that at Duke University Law she learned that women and children were chattel property and so such a question was irrelevant.  Of course, the only women and children who were chattels were slaves. Free women and children had defined rights.  Of course chattel alone defined mobile (non-real estate property). All chattels were property. "Chattel property" is redundant.  

Oh yes. Another case that came before her in the courtroom was a guy who spoke no English and was seeking a more lenient sentence on a case involving possession of 50 pounds of meth. She gave him a more lenient sentence.

She may have learned this at Duke Law (an institution that leaves me increasingly unimpressed), but humility is an important trait in a judge.  5/27/26 CNBC:

A federal judge has been disciplined for having sex in their chambers with a high-ranking law enforcement officer within earshot of staff, attending a partisan political event and for lying to superior judges who investigated the claims, a disciplinary committee revealed.

Is There A Name For This Logical Error

Everyone is familiar with post hoc, ergo propter hoc, if Y follows X, then X must have caused Y.  In the form promoted by politicians, this is often, "Many crimes use guns, therefore guns cause crime."

I am reading Haag's The Gunning of America right now, which asserts that Colt, Winchester, and Remington created an American gun culture so that they could make money selling guns to people who neither needed nor wanted them.  (You know, like those raging success stories of successful marketing: New Coke, IBM PCjr, and Edsel.)  The problem is the author explicitly says Bellesiles' Arming America was right about this, and she has dug out all the records to prove it.  Now, the paper I just asked you to read proves that X is false; the gun culture well predates these industrial gun companies.  So if X causes Y, but X is false, but you insist Y is true based on X, is there a name for such a logical error, other than Yale History Professor?