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STEPHEN AMBROSE

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.

Contents

Biography

Ambrose was born in Decatur, Illinois and grew up in Whitewater, Wisconsin and graduated from Whitewater High School.

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. 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 D-Day Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was military advisor 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 Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. The resulting biographies were generally favorable, though often critical, of Eisenhower.

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) lionized 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

Stephen Ambrose died of lung cancer on October 13, 2002 and was interred in the Garden of Memory Cemetery, in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

An unpublished novel will be published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. Entitled This Vast Land: A Young Man's Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, it is a fictionalized account of 19-year-old George Shannon, the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Ambrose appeared in and has been the subject of several documentaries — notably ABC's The Century, A&E's Biography and the acclaimed series The World at War. (Full filmography at IMDb).

Criticism

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Early in his career, Ambrose was considered a rigorous academic, but later was accused of being overly-keen on writing swiftly generated, commercially accessible products. An accomplished storyteller and accessible writer, Ambrose undeniably attracted new interest in WWII. However, his WWII books focused almost exclusively on the contributions of the US military, leaving him open to criticism that his work lacks balance.

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.

Plagiarism incident

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)

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."

Bibliography

A partial list of books:

Quotes

  • "You could add to the sum of the world's knowledge, and tell stories, and make a living doing it. Phew! Throw me into that briar patch!"
  • I went to the registrar that afternoon and changed my major, and never looked back.
  • You've got to be driven by curiosity. If you don't have that curiosity, find another way to make a living, you're never going to make it as a writer.
  • The American Dream means, to me, that you can go as far as your abilities and your energy can carry you.

External links