Almost all of those notebooks were destroyed when his office at Emory was
flooded in May 2000, Mr. Bellesiles said.
James Lindgren, a professor at Northwestern University Law School and by
far the most thorough of Mr. Bellesiles's critics, asked him last year
where he had done his research on probate records. Mr. Bellesiles
responded with a number of locations, including the San Francisco Superior
Court, where he said he had found probate records from the 1850's.
Mr. Lindgren, who has done extensive work in probate data, called the
courthouse and was told that all the records for that decade were
destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. They were not available in two
other Bay Area libraries, either. Mr. Bellesiles now says he must have
done the research somewhere else and cannot remember where.
But Kathy Beals, former director of the California Genealogical Society,
who has worked extensively with probate records from that era, said:
"Nobody knows of those records being in existence, and if they are, there
are hundreds of people who would like to look at them."
In September, Mr. Bellesiles offered a new defense. Mr. Lindgren and a
reporter from The Globe, David Mehegan, found additional serious errors on
Mr. Bellesiles's Web site, where he had been posting probate records in an
attempt to replace what he said had been lost in the flood. He conceded
the errors and responded to The Globe, and later said someone had altered
his Web site, presumably a computer hacker.
But several scholars, including one of Mr. Bellesiles's colleagues at
Emory, said they doubted that story. Robert A. Paul, the interim dean at
Emory College, said, "I can neither independently confirm nor deny that
Professor Bellesiles's Web site was hacked."
In September, James Melton, the chairman of the Emory history department,
asked Mr. Bellesiles to write a "reasoned, measured, detailed, point by
point response to your critics" in an appropriate professional forum. Mr.
Bellesiles did publish a response in the November issue of the
Organization of American Historians newsletter, but it focused on
harassment rather than charges of serious misconduct.
Mr. Bellesiles's supporters have said they expect a fuller response to
emerge in a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly to be
published next month.. A draft of the lengthy response Mr. Bellesiles
wrote for that issue, supplied by the journal's editor, concedes some
mistakes and challenges others, but leaves many serious errors
unaddressed.
It is not clear what will happen to Mr. Bellesiles or his book if the
scholarly community reaches a consensus that "Arming America" is a
seriously flawed or even fraudulent book. The Emory College dean, Mr.
Paul, said, "If there were scholarly fraud, we would take that very
seriously." Alan Brinkley, the chairman of the history department at
Columbia University, said similar questions had never been raised about a
book that had won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History and
Diplomacy. Although there has been no discussion of disciplining Mr.
Belles iles or revoking the prize, a spokesman for Jonathan R. Cole, the
provost and dean of faculties at Columbia University, said he had
distributed copies of the documents detailing Mr. Bellesiles's mistakes to
this year's three Bancroft jurors and asked them to examine it.
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