When Michael Bellesiles’s book “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” came out in 2000, it was widely praised as groundbreaking and a corrective to how Americans viewed the Second Amendment. Bellesiles’s career was launched to critical acclaim and was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the prestigious prize awarded for works on American history. But soon, the prize was retracted and the historian’s career cratered after his work proved groundbreaking for the sole reason that it was based on falsified information.
This was a time when the history industry was far less politicized and far more respected. The fact that the Bancroft Prize, awarded by trustees of Columbia University, was rescinded is enough to note that the profession was then more about scholarship and less about politics. According to Phillip W. Magness, an economic historian, author, and director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research, the response to shoddy scholarship and politically motivated narratives in historical works would be very different now….