Historian Michael Bellesiles has been stripped of the Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious award in the field of American history, by Columbia University. Columbia's trustees declared at a December 7 meeting that Bellesiles had "violated acceptable norms of scholarly conduct." In addition to revoking the Bancroft Prize, the school demanded that the $4,000 given with the prize be returned.

School officials have finally come to recognize what everyone else who has looked into the Bellesiles scandal knows: Michael Bellesiles' 2000 book Arming America: Inventing a National Gun Culture is a fraud.

Challenged to produce his source material buttressing his thesis that guns were rare in early America, Bellesiles maintained that his records were destroyed in a flood. Later, when fraudulent data was posted on his web site, Bellesiles maintained that it was the work of computer hackers. San Francisco records that he cites in the book were actually destroyed in the great earthquake of 1906. Arming America maintains that estate records in revolutionary-era Providence show that more than half of the guns listed "are evaluated as old and of poor quality." The true number is less than 10%. An article defending his thesis cited probate records from eighteenth-century Vermont that he claims described specific guns as "broken" and "old." The documents merely listed the items as "firearm" and "gun" without comment on their age or condition. Similar untruths are commonplace throughout his work.

While Columbia should be commended for revoking Bellesiles' Bancroft Prize, what does it say about Columbia-and the Bancroft Prize itself-that the school held up an academic charlatan as the pinnacle of scholarly achievement? The message is clear: if you lie for the "correct" cause (in this case gun control), you will be praised by leading scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Columbia will lavish you with thousands of dollars, and, most importantly, none of your peers will question your findings (it took gun activists and "fringe" scholars to do this).

The Arming America scandal rightly places Michael Bellesiles in disgrace. Bellesiles' enablers-Emory University (his former employer), Columbia University (which administers the Bancroft Prize), and the NEH (which awarded him a substantial tax-funded grant)-are implicated in the sordid affair no less than Bellesiles is. By disassociating themselves with this literary fraud, each of these institutions has taken the right path to finally closing the book on this matter.