Stephen Ambrose

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Stephen Ambrose, at the 2001 premiere of Band of Brothers

Stephen Edward Ambrose, Ph.D. (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

[edit] Biography

Ambrose was born in Decatur, Illinois and grew up in Whitewater, Wisconsin, and graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois.

Ambrose served as a professor of history at several universities from 1960 until his retirement in 1995, spending the bulk of his time at the University of New Orleans. For the academic year 1969-70, he was Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. In 1970, he was driven from his position at Kansas State University after heckling President Richard Nixon during a speech on campus.

Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. He was the author of several bestselling books about the war, including D-Day, Citizen Soldiers and The Victors. Other major books include Undaunted Courage, about Lewis and Clark, and Nothing Like It in the World, about the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. He was the founder of the Eisenhower Center and President of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was the military adviser on the movie Saving Private Ryan and was an executive producer on the television mini-series that was based on his book, Band of Brothers.

Eisenhower chose Ambrose as his biographer after admiring his work on Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. The resulting Eisenhower biographies were generally enthusiastic, but contained many criticisms of the former commander in chief.

Ambrose also wrote a highly regarded three-volume biography of Richard Nixon, also generally positive, but his Band of Brothers (1993) and D-Day (1994), about the lives and fates of individual soldiers in the World War II invasion, catapulted him out of the ranks of academic history and into best-sellerdom. The mini-series 'Band of Brothers' (2001) lionised American troops and helped sustain the fresh interest in WWII that was stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, and the 60th anniversary of D-Day in 2004.

Whilst earlier on in his career he was considered a fairly rigorous academic, latterly Ambrose was accused of jettisoning his past thoroughness by being over-keen to pursue swiftly generated, commercially accessible products. It is fair to acknowledge him as a talented stylist and story-teller whose work attracted new interest in WWII. Nevertheless, criticism that his WWII books lack intellectual probity and impartiality is certainly relevant; for example, his lack of willingness to acknowledge British, Canadian, French and Polish contributions in Normandy in 1944 has provoked controversy and created resentment. His well-remunerated compendium has quite correctly honoured US servicemen, but has also left a sour taste in the mouths of non-Americans. These WWII works gripping as they are, do not bear proper academic scrutiny, and other than in a dramatic context they must be absorbed with caution.

It is said that Ambrose organized his entire family into a sort of "history factory" and began turning out popular books of history like The Wild Blue (2000). He was accused by some historians of numerous inaccuracies, lack of balanced research, and indiscriminate use of uncorroborated sources. Regrettably for an author of his stature in 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages which he footnoted but did not enclose in the customary quotation marks. (source: New York Sun, Oct. 14, 2002, P. 2)

Ambrose also appeared as a Talking Head in the landmark television history of World War II, The World at War.

In 2002, Ambrose was posthumously awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Public Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

[edit] Plagiarism

In 2002, Ambrose was found to have plagiarized several passages in his book "The Wild Blue", where he only had footnoted sources but did not enclose direct quotes from the source in quotation marks. (source: New York Sun, Oct. 14, 2002, P. 2) While Ambrose downplayed the incident, stating that only a few sentences in all of his numerous books were the work of other authors, Forbes's investigation of his work found similar cases of plagiarism involving entire passages in at least six books and find a similar pattern of plagiarism going all the way back to his doctoral thesis. [1]

He offered this defense to the New York Times:

"I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation.

"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from."