Malcolm Gladwell's Invented Facts Make Good Stories

His "Revisionist History" podcast can amount to historical fiction

Being the son of two lawyers, I encountered cultural differences when I married into an Irish-American family. My new relatives were excellent story-tellers, and to them, the quality of the story was independent of its literal veracity. After a few years, I learned that when my wife is telling a story, even a story which I was a character, I should not interrupt her to correct any detail. The factual accuracy of any given detail was much less important — in fact, unimportant — compared to what the detail could contribute to an interesting yarn. So too with Malcolm Gladwell, host of the Revisionist History podcast. His tales are well-told; just don't confuse his revised narrations with actual history.

A case in point is the first episode of his 2023 gun control series, The Sudden Celebrity of Sir John Knight. To see how he revises facts to improve a story, consider a tale of his that makes me look better than in real life.

In 1686, Sir John Knight, of Bristol, England, was charged with violating the 1328 Statute of Northampton. The statute forbade the English "to go nor ride armed by night nor by day" under listed circumstances. According to the indictment, Knight "did walk about the streets armed with guns, and that he went into church of St. Michael, in Bristol, in the time of divine service, with a gun, to terrify the King's subjects."

Knight was acquitted by the jury. The presiding judge was the Chief Justice of King's Bench. His statements on the legal interpretation of the Statute of Northampton were reported by two reporters. Sir John Knight's Case, 87 Eng. Rep. 75, 3 Modern Rep. 117 (K.B. 1686); Rex v. Sir John Knight, 90 Eng. Rep. 330; Comberbach 38 (K.B. 1686).

How did this 1686 case become known to Americans? First, it was cited in William Hawkins' famous criminal law treatise, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown (1716, with 8 editions through 1824), for Hawkins' explanation of when carrying arms is and is not legal. The Hawkins treatise is tied for first as the most-owned imported criminal law book in colonial American law libraries. Herbert A. Johnson, Imported Eighteenth-Century Law Treatises in American Libraries 1700-1799 (1978). (Matthew Hale's The History of the Pleas of the Crown tied Hawkins for first.)

Hawkins' point that carrying arms is generally legal was cited by two American Justice of the Peace Manuals around the time of the Second Amendment. William Waller Hening, The New Virginia Justice 17-18 (1795); James Parker, Conductor Generalis; Or the Office, Duty and Authority of Justices of the Peace 11 (1st ed. 1764).

Besides the Hawkins treatise, another way that Knight's case likely became known was via George Wythe, of William and Mary. He was the first American law professor, and his large library included volume 3 of Modern Reports, and Comberbach, both of which reported the Knight case. Here is what Gladwell says:

David Kopel, once combed through the library of an 18th century law professor named George Wythe, who taught law to a supreme court justice, a couple of presidents, some founding fathers, and he found that John Knight's name was all over law books back then.

The part about Wythe is true. He did teach the law to John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, and many other Founders. The rest is false.

I have never been on the campus of William and Mary. The closest I ever came was chaperoning a school field trip at Colonial Williamsburg. If I had gone to the William and Mary campus, I could not have "combed through" Wythe's library, because it no longer exists. Wythe gave his library to Thomas Jefferson, who later donated it to the Library of Congress, which the British burned on August 19, 1814, during the War of 1812.

Because neither I nor any man alive have ever seen any of the physical books in Wythe's library, I never said that Wythe's library shows that "John Knight name was all over law books back then." To the contrary, Knight's name isn't even mentioned in the Hawkins treatise; rather, Hawkins just cites "3 Mod. 117, 118" as part of his support for the statement "That no Wearing of Arms is within the Meaning of the Statute [of Northampton] unless it be accompanied by such Circumstances as are apt to terrify the People . . . " 1 Hawkins at ch. 63, page 136.

What I actually did was spend a few minutes on William & Mary Law Library's website, Wythepedia: The George Wythe Encyclopedia, which catalogues all the books of Wythe's library. Finding out that Wythe owned the Hawkins book and the two reporters who covered the John Knight case took me just a few minutes. (Here are the William and Mary Library cites for Wythe's ownership of Hawkins, 3 Modern Reports, and Comberbach.)

Gladwell's invention of the library tale makes for better story-telling. It exaggerates the importance of Gladwell's own story about John Knight, with his name "all over the law books back then." Likewise, the invented story about me having "combed" through Wythe's library is more interesting than the actual facts of my doing a few minutes of Internet research into an online catalog for a library that ceased to exist over two centuries ago.

To further heighten the drama of Gladwell's historical fiction, he names me "a founding member of the John Knight fan club." According to Gladwell, I consider Knight "the man whose brave example saved America from the tyranny of restrictive gun laws."

Actually, I have never written a single good word about Sir John Knight. My longest treatment of Knight's Case is in my coauthored textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment, chapter 22, pages 2100-02. There, I pointed out that Knight, "loved to use the law to persecute non-Anglicans" — namely Catholics, and also Protestants who did not adhere to the Church of England.

Perhaps Gladwell invented the claim that I supposedly extol John Knight because when I was in England on vacation, I visited the scene of the alleged crime that led to Knight's famous trial: St. Michael's Church in Bristol. I also looked at the gravestones, to see if Knight was buried there, but they were too worn for legibility. While I sometimes visit famous crime scenes, the visits do not indicate that I consider anyone involved to be heroic.

Near the end of the episode, Gladwell provides the moral, via historian Tim Harris, who says Knight was "nasty," "vindictive and spiteful," "a bigot," "a troublemaker." "I would hardly say that he was the sort of hero figure that champions of American liberty would want to celebrate."

Very true, and contrary to Gladwell's claim, no American has ever "celebrate[d]" John Knight. What some Americans, including me, have done is accurately describe the legal case. A person who accurately describes Miranda v. Arizona (1966) (6th Amendment self-incrimination) or Roper v. Simmons (2005) (8th Amendment cruel and unusual punishment) is not being a "fan" of Ernesto Miranda or Christopher Simmons. Miranda and Simmons were bad people. Even so, their cases set important limits on state power. To cheer the results in the Miranda or Simmons cases is not to "celebrate" either defendant.

Gladwell's concoction of Americans who celebrate Sir Knight is part of a larger fiction. He claims that the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen pivoted on Knight's case. That case involved the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

According to Gladwell:

You want to play early history? I give you a crucial law from 1328, which absolutely the founders knew about that restricts guns WAY MORE than anything we're talking about in this court, your honor. If court cases are chess, this is check. The only way the gun rights crowd can win is if they can find their own bit of ancient history that trumps the Statute of Northampton, and incredibly, they do.

Then:

Everyone thinks that English common law, on which the American legal tradition is based, was hostile to people walking around with guns, but that is not true. John Knight was acquitted. John Knight goes up against the Statute of Northampton and John Knight wins. One side says, "The Statute of Northampton, check." The other side counters, "John Knight, checkmate."

The check/checkmate line is clever storytelling, but it's a figment of Gladwell's active imagination.

Regarding Gladwell's claim that "Everyone thinks that English law . . . was hostile to people walking around with guns." In 1689, the English Bill of Rights was enacted. It declared: "That the Subjects which are Protestants, may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions, and as allowed by Law." From then until 1870, when a tax was imposed on public handgun carry, no English law restricted an individual peaceably carrying a gun for lawful self-defense, and there are no known cases of any such prosecution.

In Knight's case, the Chief Justice said that the Statute of Northampton had "almost gone in desuetude." That is, it had been unenforced for so long that it had almost become legally unenforceable. But the Chief Justice saved the statute, for he said that it simply reflected a longstanding principle of common law: carrying a weapon is unlawful when done in malo animo — with bad intent. The few post-1686 prosecutions under the Statute of Northampton all involved persons who were behaving dangerously with arms. E.g. Rex v. Dewhurst, 1 State Trials, N.S. 529, 601-02 (1820) ("A man has a clear right to protect himself when he is going singly or in a small party upon the road where he is travelling or going for the ordinary purposes of business. But I have no difficulty in saying you have no right to carry arms to a public meeting, if the number of arms which are so carried are calculated to produce terror and alarm. . . .") (discussing constitutionality of a temporary law against arms carrying by rebels in six counties); Rex v. Meade, 19 L. Times Rep. 540, 541 (1903) (a man shot a pistol through a neighbor's window because of a dispute over a woman; the public should "know that people could not fire revolvers in the public streets with impunity."). See also Kopel et al., Firearms Law at 2103-07 (post-1686 history of Statute of Northampton in English law).

As for the Bruen case, nothing in English history was ever "check" or "checkmate." The core of the Bruen decision is the original public meaning of the Second Amendment, when it was ratified by the American people in 1791. The opinion of the Court is 63 pages in U.S. Reports. The Statute of Northampton is discussed in two pages (starting on the second half of page 31), and Knight's case gets one long paragraph. The Statute of Northampton reappears for one sentence on page 36.

Although Gladwell says that originalism is to "play early history," a 1328 English statute and a failed 1686 English prosecution are not "check" or "checkmate" for discerning American original public meaning in 1791; the laws of America in the immediately preceding and following decades are much more relevant, said the Court. Colonial laws are covered in pages 37-42 of the Bruen opinion. American laws between 1791 and the beginning of the Civil War are pages 42-51. These are the core of Bruen's historical analysis. Gladwell's notion of "check" in 1328 England and "checkmate" in 1686 make for an entertaining podcast, but not for accurate legal history.

Relying on Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast for actual history is like relying on Comedy Central to understand current events. If you already know the relevant history or news, then the programs are entertaining, but not to be taken seriously. I haven't fact-checked all of Malcolm Gladwell's work, but I do know that a story-teller who announces that a person was in a place he has never been (me, on the William & Mary campus) combing through a library collection that has not existed for over two centuries (George Wythe's personal collection), the story-teller's prime objective is not accuracy.

Comments

[TGGP]

"Matthew Simmons"
Christopher Simmons. I don't know whether the founder of Simmons & Company International was a bad guy, but he wasn't a party to Roper v. Simmons.

[Sarcastr0]

"What I actually did was spend a few minutes William & Mary Law Library's website, Wythepedia: The George Wythe Encyclopedia, which catalogues all the books of Wythe's library."
That's a pretty lame quibble.

He should have run his piece by you, but a lot of your objections seem a battle of the subjective perspectives.

Though you do make a convincing case that you are evidently no fan of Sir Knight. That seems outta line.

[Full disclosure, I tried Gladwell's podcast for it's first season and found him insufferable.]

[Cory C.]

That was a stupid point.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Historical autodidact Kopel seems insecure about his own capacity to do historical research. He should be.

[Kazinski]

Bruen broke a lot of people, Gladwell is just one of them.

The 2nd amendment did more than just preserve the right of the people to keep and bear arms as it existed in England. For one thing, the English right could be infringed, or completely wiped out.

Ours can't.

Nobody since Michael Bellesiles has really tried to dispute the parameters of the RKBA at the founding, other than to assert we are all slaves now.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Nobody since Michael Bellesiles has really tried to dispute the parameters of the RKBA at the founding,

Kazinski — Sort of right. The Bellesiles fraud was like plowing sand into that particular historical field. Nothing much has grown there since.

Totally wrong? Any notion that Bellesiles's apparent premises—as opposed to his corrupt methods—have been overturned.

Bellesiles ran into methodological trouble, failed to prove his case, and got into trouble trying to falsify the record. He deserved what he got. Nothing about that sorry incident in any way establishes that a contrary case made up by gun advocates is historically well founded. Their case remains as unproven as that of Bellesiles.

I offer you one point to reflect upon. Edmund Morgan must be numbered among the most erudite American historians ever. He was a specialist in the pre-revolutionary colonial era, dating back to Jamestown.

Morgan read Bellesiles’s book, and sniffed nothing amiss. Morgan—who carried in his head an encyclopedia of colonial records of every kind, and possessed staggering talent to cross-reference the contents of that trove—endorsed the book. That turned out a professional embarrassment, but a trivial one for Morgan, whose expertise on that period continues to command respect more than 75 years after his long life’s work began.

Historian peer review is not expected to extend to checking every footnote. That means Bellsiles’s overall account, considered generally, squared with what Morgan knew and would expect of that period. That is only indirect evidence, but given Morgan’s expertise, it is hard to overlook.

No scholar remotely comparable to Morgan—if there have been any—has appeared to say anything to the contrary—and especially not to endorse the notion of a wild-west style gun culture extending back into the pre-founding era. What every scholar who does study that era can notice, if he cares to, is that guns were a scarce commodity, and that bullets, and especially gun powder, were barely supplied domestically at all—right through the opening years of the American revolution.

Those indisputable facts suggest that whatever gun culture existed supported only a smallish domestic market. The records do show a tendency to stick around in various states of indifferent repair for guns imported into the colonies during previous wars. They do not show abundant supply of colonially crafted guns. As with almost every kind of manufactured goods, some guns were imported as a matter of everyday commerce. Those tended to leave shipping records of the kinds historians like Morgan love to burrow into.

Also, colonial era records abound in cases to show gun restrictions. Magistrate’s records show legal constraints on gun carriage and guns use were often imposed customarily, without benefit of, or apparent public sense of any need for, laws to authorize a magistrate to constrain gun use. It is almost as if at some times in settled places, an anti-gun culture was the presumptive norm of colonial experience, with a more pro-gun culture on the frontier.

Decades before Bellesiles began his research, I read historical records from that period, with a particular eye to gun related topics. Some of the very estate records Bellesilles got into trouble with, I considered and rejected as too hard to interpret accurately.

I began that research with expectation that I would discover abundant gun use, and a near-universal gun culture. I undertook that line with intent to make a related point, about colonial era subsistence. That intent ended in fruitful frustration, because what I actually found was rather like the conclusion reached later by Bellesiles—not so many guns around, not so much tolerance of their use. That frustration nudged me in the direction of the only notable historical finding I ever made, before taking my career in other directions.

To be sure, even if some good historian does discover in the colonial past what advocates like Kopel are heedlessly certain must be there, it will not much change the history or meaning of the 2A. That was a politically-founded compromise, undertaken for reasons that had surprisingly little to do with specific content of a national gun culture, which did not exist. Instead, there were various gun cultures throughout the colonies. The 2A became what it was because whatever those gun cultures were, they were too diverse to unify, and thus could not be effectively Constitutionalized without favoring some and disfavoring others. Any attempt to do that would likely have thwarted ratification.

[Absaroka]

"guns were a scarce commodity"

Here's a quote from Gun Ownership in Early America: A Survey of Manuscript Militia Returns (I got access via my university account, if Yale does those):

"The data in this table indicate that the militias of New England and New York were generally well armed at the outset of the Revolutionary War. Given that these militia companies included almost all free white men aged 16 to 6o, these returns, scattered as they are, strongly indicate that gun ownership was the norm in the Northeast and that overall rates hovered around 75 per cent."

That's just one tidbit. The militia membership is a clue; many colonies had laws requiring militia membership and gun ownership (here's a list, download the PDF). Is your view that such laws were generally disobeyed?

For another tidbit, which I have given you before (page 168 of Nathanial Philbrick's 'Bunker Hill'): during the siege of Boston food was running low and the Brits agreed to let people leave with their possessions, excluding guns, and documented the guns they collected: 1778 muskets, 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses. The wiki 'History of Boston' page lists a 1765 population of 15520. And that 2400 guns isn't the whole inventory, that's just the households that left. The loyalists stayed, and the book also says that the young men of Boston had been rowing across the harbor on foggy nights to join the Revolutionary army ... some of whom might have taken a musket with them, etc, etc.

[Stephen Lathrop]

The data in this table indicate that the militias of New England and New York were generally well armed at the outset of the Revolutionary War. Given that these militia companies included almost all free white men aged 16 to 6o, these returns, scattered as they are, strongly indicate that gun ownership was the norm in the Northeast and that overall rates hovered around 75 per cent.”

Absaroka — That reads too much like a disappointed historian determined to press forward with a point which did not quite prove out. Did the data say that, or did they, "indicate," it? Against whatever indications there may be stand Washington's complaints that too many New England militia showed up without arms, and the ones who did have arms lacked powder for them.

Note also that the colonials abandoned the battle of Bunker Hill for want of powder. And note that Washington was still complaining about a severe lack of powder at Valley Forge—a lack so severe that it reportedly struck him speechless when aides brought him the news, and caused him to order the reports suppressed to avoid a security risk. The problem was so severe that the colonials attempted a raid on British Bermuda, to try to steal gun powder stored there.

Is your view that such laws were generally disobeyed?

It is my view—and a canon of historical research besides—that the texts of laws are unreliable evidence to show what happened in the past. At best, a legal text gets treated by a good historian as a signpost pointing toward an investigation. It requires effort to confirm or disprove whatever it is the text of the law might imply. There could be investigation about social practices that might have been deterred by a law, or run out of control in defiance of law, or might have been going on in complete ignorance that the law existed. Any investigation would not omit to question whether the law was passed for use as an exhortation to virtuous conduct, without intent of enforcing it at all.

(That, by the way, is one of the most troublesome problems with alleged legal originalism—it does not know that reliance on legal texts delivers only evidence of what the legal texts said, and not evidence regarding the activities the laws purported to regulate. Dobbs and Bruen are both egregious offenders.)

I remember your last mention of that Boston gun inventory. Perhaps you know where the original document recording that inventory now resides? As I recall, my efforts to find out led to a dead end in the index of a 19th century secondary source.

Not that I think that inventory is particularly sound evidence on which to base generalizations. As you mentioned, 2400 firearms is not a large number per-capita. Nor have you included evidence to show how many of those arms, if any, were serviceable. It was a time of upheaval. Seems logical to suppose that useful guns would not have been left at risk of British confiscation. As the presence of blunderbusses seems to imply, the British may have just scooped up the rusty residue of more than a century of previous conflicts.

Please remember, I am not trying to make a case that Bellesiles was right. I am instead questioning whether there is good evidence to be confident the contrary case made by gun advocates holds up. So far, I have not seen it.

[Absaroka]

"the texts of laws are unreliable evidence to show what happened in the past"

Right. The source I spoon fed you lists the militia records showing who showed up for muster and how they were armed. No doubt those records were fabricated, like NASA's moon footage, amirite?

Philbrick's source is 'the History of the Siege of Boston', by Richard Frothingham, Little, Brown, 1873. I presume you know that from your extensive research.

"2400 firearms is not a large number per-capita."

At a guess, it's roughly one per household. It seems a stretch to call that 'scarce'.

"Seems logical to suppose that useful guns would not have been left at risk of British confiscation."

You aren't thinking your narrative through. You're trying to say both that 2400 is a small number, and that 2400 is just the broken ones, while the functional ones were smuggled out. Unless you assume that only a small percentage of the guns worked, that undermines your position even more.

"Washington was still complaining about a severe lack of powder at Valley Forge"

Yup, wars do that. You may have noticed that the Ukrainians - well, everyone - has been desperate for 155 shells, and the world is trying to catch up. US production is passing 60K a month, headed for 100K next year. So you can say 155 shells are 'scarce' if you want. That doesn't mean they were exactly rare pre-war; the US was producing 14K a month then.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Absaroka, I did not ask you for Philbrick's source. I asked you if you could tell me where that document is now. The 1873 volume you cite is the one which did not answer that question for me. Secondary sources citing each other may be adequate to support popular historical accounts. By itself, that method cannot deliver context sufficient to support (or critique) original historical inference.

On your other points, you offer present-minded speculations about long-ago context and events you have not researched. I have reason to believe, after looking at probate records, that antique firearms in poor repair did tend to accumulate. I do not pretend that makes me capable to do a useful analysis. It would be a surprise if your slighting treatment of such historical questions served you better. I doubt anyone has answered them.

As for Ukraine, and its lessons to illuminate centuries-old unrelated events, are you serious? If you suppose you can mobilize a speculation which seems plausible in purely present context, to prove what actually happened centuries ago in an unrelated context, you have wandered far afield from history.

The best that kind of thinking can do is suggest need for a proper historical analysis on a different factual basis. It would have to be an analysis which confines itself entirely to the era under study, relying only on evidence which survived from that era into the present.

So do that. Tell me, how many powder mills were at work in the colonies at the outset of the revolution? When, where, and with what capacities did they operate?

A claim that a vibrant domestic gun culture operated in America prior to the revolution requires a supply of gunpowder. How much gunpowder did that gun culture require to keep it going? What percentage of that need could domestic powder mills supply? When you know enough to answer with specificity, I will be delighted to benefit from your research.

In fairness, I should mention that I looked into all that decades ago. The evidence I could find then supported a conclusion that domestic gun powder suppliers could have satisfied only a small fraction of demand, unless demand was notably smaller than would be generated by any military activity at all. That opened a question about imports. I did not find summaries of gunpowder import records, and did not attempt to do that research. Perhaps someone has done it by now.

[gormadoc]

Britain had also banned importation of gunpowder by the colonists at the end of 1774 and had been secreting known stores away when they could, which the colonists were rather angry about. That is part of why there were gunpowder shortages.

[MN2828]

If the issue is, what restrictions were historically placed on keeping and bearing arms, the only source that matters are historic restrictions. Bruen doesn't require a historical analysis, only a search for precedent.

As to the presence (or lack thereof) of guns in Colonial America, I would point out that colonists managed to get hold of enough guns to hold off the world's preeminent military power. Those guns came from somewhere.

[Stephen Lathrop]

MN2828 — They way to do the history on this topic is to show where hypothetical guns came from, in what numbers, when, paid for how, and what service those guns did. Until you can show that, you cannot, "point out," anything, because you have no specifics to point to.

Also, the topic is pre-founding era gun culture, not what happened during the revolution. My reference to Washington in Massachusetts is relevant, because it tends to show conditions at the outset of the conflict. Arms shortages at the outset tend to imply not so many arms prior to that.

Washington was not pleasantly surprised when he met the militia units in Cambridge, he was dismayed. That is inconsistent with romantic tales of colonists bristling with arms, and prepared to hurl the British back.

Later on, we know that other nations—famously including France—intervened on a massive scale. That is important to the history of the revolution, but if it illuminates the state of armed defense the colonists were capable of on their own, it more implies colonial weakness than colonial armed might.

Famously, Washington chose a strategy of not losing, and often not fighting, to outlast the British. After the French navy arrived, it worked.

Also, I think you better reread Bruen. Thomas is pretty explicit about reliance on legal texts—and texts specifically withing narrow time frames—as the acceptable method to build analogies.

[Absaroka]

"Arms shortages at the outset tend to imply not so many arms prior to that."

Alternatively, they show wastage goes way up in wartime. That the Continental Army was short of food and shoes at Valley Forge doesn't mean colonists generally were barefoot and hungry prior to the revolution.

Where do you think the arms used at Lexington and Concord came from? The Brits didn't seem to think colonial arms were in short supply that day. Were the Brits besieged in Boston by a bunch of unarmed colonists?

[Stephen Lathrop]

Were the Brits besieged in Boston by a bunch of unarmed colonists?

To an extent much greater than the Brits knew, the answer to that question is yes—or to be more precise, insufficiently armed colonists. Not until Knox arrived with the artillery from Ticonderoga did the colonists get the power they needed. Then they used it promptly to force the British evacuation.

[Absaroka]

The question isn't 'did the colonists initially possess a siege train sufficient to destroy the British fortifications'.

As the wiki article puts it "British troops were then engaged in a running battle during their march back to Boston, suffering heavy casualties.", "The siege began on April 19 after the Revolutionary War's first battles at Lexington and Concord, when Massachusetts militias blocked land access to Boston", and "The British suffered from a continual lack of food, fuel, and supplies".

You just can't spin that into "arms were rare in the colonies".

[Stephen Lathrop]

Absaroka, I tend more than most on this blog to respect Wikipedia. But your willingness takes things a bit far to suppose a British army, supported by a British fleet at liberty to roam the coastal Atlantic at will, without opposition, was somehow in dire straits for supplies.

Put aside that the British were the world's past masters of provisioning, and thoroughly practiced in all the arts to supply years-long expeditions around the globe. In Boston, British ships were at most a week's round trip from loyalist New York. That city, throughout the war, embittered colonial leaders by refusing to do business on credit or for colonial script, but delighted to trade with the British military for hard currency. And of course, British resort to loyalist parts of Nova Scotia was similarly convenient.

Compared to that, the logistical disadvantages suffered by the colonists were the more burdensome.

More generally, you seem not to notice we are talking about critique of historical inferences. We are not engaged in a scholastic-style competition to see who can pile up a taller stack of conclusory citations offered for no apparent reason except that they contribute to plausible-sounding narratives. Or merely pleasing narratives.

The art of history is not about mobilizing judgments made in present context to assess relative plausibility among competing narratives. The art of history is about methods to use historical survivals which arrived in the present absent their contexts of creation—which is almost invariably the case with historical survivals (survivals are mostly texts, but encompass a range of other types of physical evidence, all useful).

To keep present context out of the historical method, the historian constrains his efforts to making those survivals critique each other. Present-day experience is ruled out of the reckoning.

On that basis, the historian attempts to infer the missing context which did not survive, and then use that period- and place-specific context to do the job that present-minded context is logically disqualified to perform. A future which was yet to come is self-evidently powerless to have influenced the past—however vulnerable it may be to use in present-day narratives about the past.

Tell me if you think you see that valid historical process at work in the wiki article you reference. I would have expected considerably more detail if it were.

[Absaroka]

“But your willingness takes things a bit far to suppose a British army, supported by a British fleet at liberty to roam the coastal Atlantic at will, without opposition, was somehow in dire straits for supplies.”

Cool! And the Brit attempts to forage outside Boston failed not because of armed colonials but because ________? And they were so flush with supplies they evacuated Boston because _______? I’m all ears for your alternative history!

(Just to be clear, the situation was that the musket armed colonials kept the Brits hemmed into Boston, so the Brits couldn't forage, and hung on with some supplies getting in by sea. When the colonials got artillery and were emplacing it to close access to the harbor, the Brits read the - heh - tea leaves and evacuated. You just can't (plausibly!) spin that history to 'the colonists were unarmed'. You are past silly into bizarre.).

[Kazinski]

Powder is a different subject than guns. The number of guns a civilian needs and a soldier is the same: one.

The amount of powder and ammunition a civilian in the city needs isn't much, and even a rural civilian might go hunting once or twice a week at the most and take 2 or 3 shots.

A soldier better be prepared, even with a flintlock to fire a hundred times in a day long battle. Militia members were expected to show up with enough ammunition for immediate needs with resupply coming from regimental supplies.

In fact the mission of the Concord raid by British troops that started the revolutionary war was to sieze the regimental powder supplies and regimental cannon.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Kazinski — Whether or not the number of guns a civilian needs is one is not an axiomatic point upon which to hang a series of deductions. It is a key element of the point in controversy. With regard to various times and places in the past, that question certainly had various answers.

But in general, your comment, when viewed in light of the faltering initial fortunes of colonial arms, tends more to support an inference of a weak colonial gun culture than a strong one. Whatever the term, "regimental powder supplies," might mean in the context of the initial clashes of the revolution, those supplies were apparently exhausted prematurely during the second major armed encounter, at Bunker Hill.

Note that the colonists' British adversaries, operating thousands of miles from their sources of supply, were under no such disadvantage. At that time and place, the British arrived supported by a much stronger gun culture than the colonials could command.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

Bruen did not "break" Gladwell. He was misrepresenting things long before that decision. I listened to some episodes of his podcast, I liked the one about shooting basketball free throws underhand. Maybe that's because I don't know enough about basketball to notice anything he got wrong. The rest were either trite or so riddled with inaccuracies that even I noticed them.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Being the son of two lawyers, I encountered cultural differences when I married into an Irish-American family.

What?

[Cory C.]

Lawyers = must use facts/evidence to tell stories. Irish = don’t let stories get bogged down by facts/evidence.

[Ridgeway]

"Being the son of two lawyers" = "Coming from a Jewish family"

[Roger S]

I have heard Gladwell being challenged on his articles and books that grossly distort social science research. His answer was that he is just a storyteller. So yes, listen to him for entertainment, not accuracy.

[Michael P]

Was the name of the podcast what gave it away?

[Roger S]

Sorry, it was 10-15 years ago. I probably should not defame someone without providing a source, but I think he would describe himself as a storyteller.

[SRG2]

I always found him too glib to be reliable, unlike say James Gleick.

[ReaderY]

I have to say, I don’t think the main “inaccuracy” discussed is actually inaccurate. Nobody searches through physical libraries anymore. Searching through a library means searching through its on-line catalog. That’s what it means today. And it perhaps reflects Professor Kopel’s age that the older meaning would come to mind as not just the main but the only proper meaning.

I would see this quibble as similar to catching someone at a falsehood for saying he “dialed” someone when he actually pressed keyboard buttons rather than using a physical dial. Or, perhaps more to the point, calling someone out for making false statements for referring to web posts as “the press” when in fact no physical pressing of ink onto paper occurred, but only electronic signals. I see this as similar.

[ReaderY]

While Mr. Gladwell may well have mischaracterized Professor Kopel’s position, this post doesn’t give me any confidence that he did. It makes me more inclined to suspect that perhaps Professor Kopel has mischaracterized Mr. Gladwell’s position.

[CommentMonkey]

But Kopel's "characterization" of Gladwell's position consists almost entirely of quotations. Do you think he's making them up?

Looking at the transcript of the podcast, it seems to me Kopel's description was pretty fair. Gladwell mischaracterized what Kopel told him in order to cast Kopel as a fan of Sir John Knight. He then snarkily transitioned from an exchange with Kopel (who probably thought he was being interviewed for a straight historical piece) by proclaiming that he wants to "check in with a more disinterested historian of that period." And then he presents, via other historians, all the unflattering information about Sir John Knight that Kopel doubtlessly would have conceded (and does, in this post) had Gladwell asked him.

Gladwell is a poor man's John Oliver. If you don't know anything about the subject he's discussing and are pre-disposed to agree with his priors, it's easy to bask in the flattery loop - this guy is smart and glib and I agree with him; I must be pretty sharp too! Otherwise his work seems too sloppy, and his intellectual preening too overt, to be worth the time it takes to consume it.

[M L]

I read “Tipping Point” years ago and was pretty unimpressed by this vaunted new public intellect, a midwit trading on hokey stuff, with a decent helping of patently fallacious leftwing PC arguments tossed in that dragged the whole thing down – though I did like and come away with a few salient concepts and anecdotes. I didn’t articulate it quite that way at the time but I may be turning into a grumpy old skeptic.

[Bubba Jones]

I've read a couple of Gladwell's books and they are entertaining. But the anecdotes serve to illustrate a point about perspective, etc. They aren't a reference work.

And as mentioned above, I also found his podcast trite.

Mostly I hate podcasts.

[David Nieporent]

The Tipping Point was a great article in the New Yorker. He then expanded into a book, which was… a great magazine article, padded into a book.