BELLESILES UPDATE: Here’s an interesting discussion thread on H-Net, a historians’ email list. Bellesiles, consistent with his agenda of showing that only the government, and professional soldiers, were possessed of, and competent in the use of guns, frequently dismisses the Revolutionary militias as ineffective. In this post Bellesiles is taken to task at great length for misrepresenting the Battle of Cowpens, where revolutionary militias defeated the British. (Note the British letter quoted at the very end). Another post by the same author suggests that Bellesiles misrepresents the effectiveness of the militia more generally.

A Bellesiles defender responds here to the effect that Bellesiles’ views on the militia may be biased but are consistent with other sources, but this reply indicates that those “other sources” are rather old and have been discredited by more recent work that Bellesiles (and his defender) ignore.

Particularly interesting in the last item are links to the US Army Command and General Staff College and the U.S. Army’s Center for Military History, whose studies support the effectiveness of the militia. (This is all the more impressive because for over a century professional military men had a policy of deriding the effectiveness of the militia, and of citizen-soldiers generally). Academic historians — like academics specializing in international law — often forget that they do not have a monopoly on the field, and that an awful lot of expertise resides elsewhere. I suspect that there are more accomplished scholars of military history, and working lawyers in the field of international law, than there are academic experts at the top 50 research universities. I’ve met some of these people, and they’re pretty damned smart.

Most university people are smart, but most smart people aren’t at universities.