Draw a Circle and Include Me Out ...
Clayton, read my lips: Thanks for the welcome, but I don't agree with you and I'm not joining your club!
So far as I can tell, the basic difference between us is this: you begin with what you regard as a self-evident truth."Historians are corrupt" or"guns are omnipresent" and then you clutch scattered droppings of evidence supporting your generalization to them. I cite five instances of historians who have violated the canons of good historical practice and ask why isn't our major professional organization bothering to pay attention to their breach of them. You can't draw grand generalizations from five discrete examples. Your doing so is a crude smear of American historians in general -- McCarthyism redivivus and you need to sober up. These are five instances of historical malpractice: no more and no less.
Now, I'll tell you why your manuscript is a dog. My sense is that it began life as a tallying of all the evidence you could find that showed that Bellesiles's thesis in Arming America is wrong. Only if it began life that way would it make any sense to organize the research findings as you have, according to the type of evidence. At some point, I take it, a publisher told you that the moment when anyone might be interested in a book about how wrong Michael Bellesiles was passed about three years ago. But you were stuck with this organization of your research and, so, you just relabled it as a history of gun ownership in ante-bellum America. One thing that Bellesiles got right was that history is a record of change over time. He may have gotten the record of it entirely wrong, but he rightly sensed that there was a story to tell, one that varied from time to time and place to place. Really, Clayton, my sense from reading your manuscript is that the Pilgrims came armed to the teeth with BC-47s and, as population grew, it only got more so. Yes, Bellesiles made stuff up. We got that point three years ago. There are other researchers at work on the subject who will do the fine toothed research and thoughtful development of a narrative that neither you nor Michael have done properly. I'll send you some detailed comments about stylistic errors via e-mail, but I'd recommend that you try a vanity publisher for the book.