As if Clayton Cramer hasn't already commented extensively here, he responds at his own blog with a hypothetical: a historian publishes a book – not about the paucity of guns in early America – but about Happy Slaves. Read his hypothetical and let us know over here what you think about it. He doesn't have reader feedback on his blog.

In comments below, Andrew Ackerman, who followed the Bellesiles case closely at Emory, and Danny Loss, who admits to not knowing much about the case, but was surprised at Claytonian logic, both ask legitimate questions. Ackerman asks"Are you historians going to respond to Clayton Cramer's indictment of the profession or are you just going to ignore him?" Loss asks"Will Clayton Cramer respond to the questions posed to him?"

I can't speak for either Clayton Cramer or for the history profession. I have some familiarity with the Bellesiles case and some sense about the history profession. From those perspectives, I think there are two things to be said: 1) Clayton is right; and 2) Clayton is wrong. I'm not being facetious, straddling a fence, or displaying the yellow stripe that runs down my back.

Clayton is right about the Bellesiles case having been a huge embarrassment to American historians. It embarrassed a major department, a prime publisher, our most important journal, our peer review processes, our most important prize for outstanding work, major sources of funding – the whole apparatus for academic work in history. I think even those who didn't follow the case closely know that there were enormous consequences for Bellesiles. He lost his job, his book was withdrawn by his publisher, and his prestigious prize was rescinded. More importantly for the profession, the Bellesiles case occurred concurrently with other serious embarrassments. So much so that both the American Historical Association (see: Perspectives: Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 42 [February and March 2004]: 17-23, 21-25) and the Organization of American Historians (see: Journal of American History, 90 [March 2004]: 1325-1356)* took action to review where we stand. If anything, there is a sense in which Cramer understates the problem because of his Michael-one-note. So, my answer to Andrew Ackerman is that the historians are responding to the problems, even if the response isn't satisfactory to Clayton Cramer. I am enough of a Niebuhrian to be skeptical of the collective action of any group, but insofar as groups can be trusted, historians have been responding to the sense of crisis among them.

But there is a huge sense in which Cramer is utterly wrong and wrong in a way that has dogged his effectiveness in the Bellesiles case from the beginning. It is clearly evident even in his latest round of charges. Cramer makes no effort to delimit his accusations."I no longer have any illusion that these ‘professional standards' are adhered to by the vast majority of history professors teaching in the U.S.," says he. The fact is that, even if you expand from his monomaniacal fixation on the Bellesiles case to include the cases of other historians accused of ethical breaches in the last few years, as I think you must, the accusations were limited to a handful of historians, almost all of them historians of the United States and, Clayton, several of the most prominent of them were not even in the professorate or in the classroom.

But, if you look at Cramer's accusation, he makes no such distinctions: because of Bellesiles,"the vast majority" of historians of ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East are guilty. Or because of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose – regardless of the fact that they were not teaching --"the vast majority of history professors teaching in the U.S." are guilty. Or, give Cramer his due, those who recommended Bellesiles's article or book for publication, recommended his project for funding or gave the book positive reviews are tainted. Regardless of the merit of that argument, you are still talking about a few dozen historians. But, because of them,"the vast majority of history professors teaching in the U.S." are guilty. How quickly the professor who teaches American constitutional history at Boisie State University dismisses the assumption of innocense until guilt is proven. And you have to prove guilt one case at a time.

I've told Clayton repeatedly that this kind of carelessness rendered his critique of Bellesiles's work largely ineffective from the outset. I've read the article he submitted to the JAH and elsewhere, which challenged Bellesiles's argument. It was suggestive and Clayton was clearly on to something, which turned out in the end to have been a big something. But it had neither the careful empirical precision of Jim Lindgren's work nor the sophistication of Bellesiles's critics in the William and Mary Quarterly. His gross accusations about"the vast majority of history professors teaching in the U.S." are symptomatic of the problem. Take it from Loss, Clayton: you're wrong. You're also right, of course; but Bellesiles doesn't a whole profession make.

*I apologize for being unable to link to these articles, but the AHA server seems to be down and the JAH articles are subscriber only.