BELLESILES-O-RAMA: Professor Jerome Sternstein writes on History News Network about the contradictions and implausibilities in Michael Bellesiles’ “My notes were destroyed in a flood” story. He even reports on an experiment in which yellow legal pads bearing pencil marks remained completely legible despite being soaked in water.

Meanwhile, Eugene Volokh (from whose site I got the Sternstein link above) fact checks a minor statement of Bellesiles’ about Justice Scalia’s position on machine guns, and finds it, er, lacking in academic rigor. Volokh asks: “Is it considered standard practice for historians to make assertions — with no qualification or explanation of the possible weakness of the source (either in the text or the footnotes), but merely as ‘Justice Antonin Scalia agreed with . . .’ — based on a single newspaper opinion piece, that uses as its source a high school student who says she heard someone say something at a small luncheon?”

This is a prize-winning historian at work?