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History's Ethical Crisis: An Introduction
Joanne Meyerowitz
| 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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In the unfolding drama of the recent cases, the Journal of American History had its own small part. In 1996 we published an essay by Bellesiles, "The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760–1865," which laid out the arguments later developed in his book. As the book came under scrutiny, scholars returned to the article and found flaws in its table 1. One author went so far as to claim: "This entire scandal might have been avoided in 1996 with more conventional editing at the JAH."3 The article had gone through our usual peer review and editing process, but we had not, of course, sent our editorial assistants to the various archives to check the author's primary research. For that, we had relied, as all journals do, on trust. Nonetheless, our editors, peer reviewers, and staff could and should have noticed the flaws in table 1, such as the failure to include the sample size in each of the table's cells, to indicate which counties were used to construct each regional category, and to note the exact locations of the county records used. In our office, the Bellesiles controversy led to reassessment of our vetting and editing processes and refresher instructions on how to read and edit quantitative materials. |
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But the Journal's role in one recent case is less important than the larger issues raised. Taking the cases together, the constellation of alleged misdeed suggests we should think seriously about the neglected field of historical ethics. Is unprofessional or unethical conduct on the rise, and, if so, why? Are historians' ethics under heightened scrutiny, and, if so, why? How might we use the scrutiny—heightened or not—to improve the practice of history? What are the central ethical concerns facing professional historians? Does the American Historical Association's Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct provide an adequate code of ethics for historical practice?4 Do we need to publicize it, enforce it, or revise it? Are there different ethical standards in different genres of history? And how might we teach historical ethics to our students? To begin the conversation, we invited a few scholars and editors to write short essays. We did not ask our contributors to research or rehash the specifics of recent cases. Instead, we asked them to ponder the larger issues and address the following question: "How does (or should) the current ethical crisis change or challenge the way we think about, teach, read, write, and publish history?" |
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Notes
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