History's Ethical Crisis

In the past few years, public accounts of misconduct by historians have suggested that we may have an ethical crisis in our profession. For those readers who missed the multiple allegations of lies told, passages plagiarized, and evidence misrepresented, the bare-bones outlines of the most prominent cases are as follows. In spring 2001, the press reported that the historian Joseph J. Ellis had fabricated stories during classroom lectures at Mount Holyoke College. The stories involved his own activities in the 1960s, most notably false accounts of military service in Vietnam. Ellis issued a written apology, and Mount Holyoke suspended him without pay for a year. Early in 2002 journalists trained their investigative skills on the historians Stephen E. Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, both of whom had replicated numerous passages from other authors' books but failed to place the appropriated words in quotation marks. Ambrose and Goodwin acknowledged the borrowings but claimed they had occurred through inattention rather than from intent.1 Meanwhile, the historian Michael A. Bellesiles's Arming America invited attention with a controversial argument disputing the prevalence of gun ownership in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book won high-profile reviews in general publications, initial praise from various historians, and a major prize but aroused the ire of advocates of gun ownership, including the National Rifle Association. Soon it also attracted the microscopic inspection of scholars who dissected the evidence that supported its argument. In the summer of 2002, a committee appointed by Emory University, Bellesiles's employer, concluded an in-depth investigation, which found “sloppy scholarship,” “unprofessional and misleading work,” and “evidence of falsification.” Bellesiles subsequently resigned from the Emory faculty. He granted that he had made errors in his work, but he denied that he had fabricated or willfully misrepresented evidence.2

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