[Montana Moe]

In the Writer category, Jim Garrison's Briefs selects: Stephen Edward Ambrose, Ph.D. (1936-2002)



While he's been called a plagiarist, his writings as well as his influence in other media/historical projects has drawn attention to historical moments in American history that needed to be illuminated.

Ambrose's works serve as fertile ground for cultivating another generation of history buffs such as myself.

Biographies:
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/amb0bio-1 (Great interview with Ambrose on this site as well)

A chance visit to New Orleans during spring break further determined the course of his life. He "fell in love with that old bag of bones of a city," he says, and after completing a doctorate in history, he began a30-year teaching career at the University of New Orleans. His first book Halleck, was published in 1962. It sold under 1,000 copies in its first printing, but caught the eye of one of Ambrose's heroes. The 28 year-old professor was amazed to receive a phone call from former President Dwight Eisenhower, who invited him to write his authorized biography.

For five years, Ambrose met regularly with the former President at Eisenhower's farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He enjoyed the cooperation of Eisenhower's friends and associates, and full access to his presidential papers. The two-volume biography that resulted remains the definitive work on the 34th President, and established Stephen Ambrose as one of America's foremost historians.

Ambrose served as historical consultant for Steven Spielberg's film about D-Day, Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg and Tom Hanks later produced a television miniseries based on Ambrose's Band of Brothers.

After retiring from his chair as Boyd Professor of History at the University of New Orleans, Dr. Ambrose served as the Director Emeritus of the Eisenhower Center, and the founder and President of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans.(http://www.ddaymuseum.org)

He was a contributing editor for the Quarterly Journal of Military History, a member of the board of directors for American Rivers, and a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council Board. Stephen Ambrose and his wife Moira made their homes in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi and Helena, Montana.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Ambrose

Re: Plagiarism

In 2002, Ambrose was found to have plagiarized several passages in his book The Wild Blue by Sally Richardson and others. Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard reported that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II by Thomas Childers (a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania).

Ambrose and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, released an apology as a result. Ambrose had only footnoted sources and did not enclose in direct quotes significant passages taken from Childers' book.
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 found a similar pattern of plagiarism going all the way back to his doctoral thesis.
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."

The "History News Network" web site of George Mason University, however, in a web article entitled "How the Ambrose story developed", detailed seven of Ambrose's works that had plagiarized at least 12 authors.

Published Works
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point
Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe
The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment
Eisenhower
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944
Eisenhower: Soldier and President
Nixon
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
Upton and the Army
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945
Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938
Americans at War
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II
An epic American exploration: the friendship of Lewis and Clark
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals
Nothing Like it in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian