These issues have been well discussed by Professor Bellesiles’s fellow professors around Emory. The consensus at Emory seems to be that there was indeed hate mail sent to Bellesiles. How extensive it actually was is a subject of speculation. After all, there are indeed people that others reasonably consider “gun nuts.” But as to his story about his office door being set on fire, that story is generally viewed around Emory as a hoax, much like his claim that his website was hacked.
As support for the public resolutions, Professor Bellesiles told the Chronicle of Higher Ed that someone had set his office door on fire. How could that have happened without his colleagues at Emory or Emory administrators finding out? Yet his history colleagues have let it be known around campus that they had never heard of it before reading it in the Chronicle.
When Professor Bellesiles moved from Atlanta, he said nothing about harassment as the reason for moving. Only a year or two later, after the book was exposed and its support was falling apart, did he come up with this claim. As everyone in the Emory history department knows, Bellesiles moved before Arming America was published, not after as most reporters have somehow been led to believe.
It seems quite plausible that Bellesiles received some hate mail, for which he deserves sympathy. But Professor Bellesiles’s story about the office door being set on fire is no more credible than his story about his website being hacked, or his story about the flood, or his story about someone changing his emails, or his story about having read hundreds of probate files in San Francisco County, or his story about guns not being stored in the home, or his story about guns being ignored in travel accounts, or his story . . . .
by E. A. on August 14, 2002 at 10:25 PM