Dear VA-HIST Friends:  A few days ago VA-HIST posts gave us links to recent articles in the Boston Globe and the National Review.  In light of that I think it is appropriate to post this from the H-OIEAHC list - complete with the prefatory comment from that list's moderator, John Saillant, of Western Michigan University.           -Jon Kukla

H-OIEAHC Subscribers, Michael Bellesiles has sent a post to the list with a request that it be published but without his own email address attached. Given his experience with his own computer attached to the internet, it's obvious that this is a reasonable request. I maintain the position that I believe virtually all of us agreed on before: discussion of _Arming America_ is acceptable, even welcome, but _ad hominem_ comments are not. John Saillant, Western Michigan University

First please allow me to note that the statistical errors noted in the Boston Globe article were on my web site, not in the book Arming America. I stand behind the research in my book and am doing my best to replicate and expand on the data that supported the five paragraphs in that book on probate records that form the core of the criticisms of that text. I know that none of this can be done quickly enough to appease the media, which must have its answers immediately, but I have little alternative. Apparently no other historian has ever lost research as the result of a fire, flood, theft, or other disaster. I regret deeply having lost my original notes in the flood at Bowden Hall last year and am open to suggestions for further penance.

When the reporter from the Boston Globe called me last week and told me that he had personally viewed four probate files in Rutland, Vermont, that contained different words from those on my web site, I was stunned. I could not believe that I had made such errors but clearly had to take full responsibility. The insertion of the words "old" and "broken" and the replacement of "a gun barrel" with an "old gun" struck me as mystifying but nonetheless egregious errors.

However, there is slightly more to the story. Those errors are not mine, but the work of someone else. I am learning about the web fast, moving from no knowledge at the beginning of the year to a sad experience of its dangers today. I had no idea that someone could take what is on your web site, alter it, and put it back. That is what someone did to my site. I do not know when this happened, for I never looked at my material after I put it on the web -- a terrible mistake I have learned. When I looked closely this past weekend, I discovered that my North Carolina materials were not on the site, large portions of my essay on using probate materials were missing, as were sections of my bibliographies, and words had been added to my probate records. Most outrageously, and this would be funny in other circumstances, someone had gone through the book section of the probate material and inserted "Cleland's Memoirs" in several of the book listings. It took me a while to catch on to that one, and I only did so because it appeared several times. Al Young kindly informed me that "Cleland's Memoirs" is the famous early work of pornography, Fanny Hill, published in the 1760s as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure! Some rather sophisticated hacker made these religious Vermont, Maine, and Ohio settlers into devotees of porn.

After I discovered these alterations in my web site, I called Emory's web administrator and asked her to shut down my web page. I have hired a graduate student to restore the web site with its original folders and the correct information, and Emory has placed it on their server where it should be better protected from hackers. I will also post a warning that people should realize that this is a web site, not a published work, and I will make hard copies available to interested parties so as to better control for accuracy.

All of this seems terribly trivial this week, but I have been told that a lot of energy is being put into spreading this Boston Globe article, with calls for my firing being sent to the President and Trustees of my university. None of what I say above in any way argues that there are no errors on my original web site, nor that Arming America is error free. Again I may be unusual in being capable of mistakes, but I will always do my best to correct them as I see that as one of the historian's tasks. I have been criticized for not being available on the internet, and must again apologize for having been driven from that service by deliberately sent viruses. Now I am criticized for errors that seem to have been planted on my web site. I would rather apologize for the errors I make than those given to me. I thank you all for your patience and invite you to visit the web site, which should be restored within two weeks.

Michael Bellesiles
Department of History
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322

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