CRANKY PROFESSOR MICHAEL TINKLER spots what looks to be another lie by Michael Bellesiles:

What’s driving this post is that one of my friends worked as his graduate assistant in 1988-89 (we think). He was good to work for – he had reasonable ideas about how much time a second-year graduate student should devote to someone else?s research, and the work was not too horrible (by the standards of humanities research). She spent all year in the microforms area the basement of the library reading probate records. She was counting guns and entering the numbers into a spreadsheet. . . .

Professor Bellesiles had, like all professors in the history department, access to graduate assistants in (almost) any term he decided he needed one. Emory, like many graduate schools in the humanities, lets students take their first year to become accustomed to graduate work – nothing required of the students in exchange for the fellowship but course work. Then in the second year most departments require an assistantship or internship. My friend was Bellesiles’ graduate assistant in 1988.

I emailed her late last month to ask about this – and to point out that he claimed to have done it all alone. She agreed that she had been counting guns. Her instructions were to count anything that might be a misspelled gun as a gun, which she feels this tends to prove that Professor Bellesiles was not intentionally understating the count. She then entered this data on a Lotus spreadsheet.

Crash go two of his claims – no help, and all his work was on yellow legal pads

This is pretty damning stuff, and from a fellow professor of history, no less. Be sure you read the entire post, as the excerpt above telescopes some imporant aspects. Cranky Professor Michael Tinkler promises more, too.