MELISSA SECKORA has a story on the Bellesiles resignation that’s worth reading. Excerpt:

The committee’s investigation focused on Bellesiles’s use of probate records, which the New York Times has called “Mr. Bellesiles’s principal evidence.” Of particular interest was a key table on which the author’s thesis is grounded. “Evaluating Table One is an exercise in frustration because it is almost impossible to tell where Bellesiles got his information. His source note lists the names of 40 counties, but supplies no indication of the exact records used or their distribution over time. After reviewing his skimpy documentation, we had the same question as [one reviewer] Gloria Main: ‘Did no editors or referees ever ask that he supply this basic information?’ … The best that can be said about his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work.”

The committee also agreed with Professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University that the entire scandal could have been avoided with “more conventional editing” by The Journal of American History and with Ohio State’s Randolph Roth, who determined that Bellesiles’s numbers were “mathematically improbable or impossible.” Additionally, the committee found that “no one has been able to replicate Bellesiles’s results [on low percentage of guns] for the places or dates he lists”; that he conflated wills and inventories which “greatly reduced the percentage of guns in estates”; took a “casual approach” to gathering data; “[raised] doubts about his veracity” in claiming to have worked with records in California; and raised questions about his use of microfilm at the National Archives Record Center in East Point, Ga. They also called implausible Bellesiles’s claim that false data on his website was put there by a hacker, and his disavowal of e-mails that he wrote to researchers, giving the wrong location for almost all of his probate research.

This is a good one-stop summary for those who haven’t been following the case, and it has links to many useful documents. The big news: “And now that the Emory report is out, scholars expect Columbia to investigate the possibility of revoking Bellesiles’s Bancroft Prize.”

UPDATE: The History News Network has a list of questions that remain unanswered after Bellesiles’ resignation. And this comment thread is amusing, in a nauseous kind of way.