Stephen E. Ambrose: Difference between revisions
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A similar controversy ensued when Ambrose, in two separate accounts, implied cowardice by a [[United Kingdom|British]] [[coxswain]] of a landing craft during the landings at [[Omaha Beach]]. One writer claimed that the first account was drawn from a work by [[S.L.A. Marshall]].<ref name="wc" /> The second of Ambrose's two accounts may{{weasel-inline}} have been drawn from the oral history of an infantryman who claimed publicly that when the coxswain of a landing craft tried to lower the ramp 100 yards from shore and begin offloading, a sergeant held a gun to the coxswain's head and ordered him to go in farther.<ref>C-SPAN recording of Sgt Slaughter at the Eisenhower Center, New Orleans, May 1994</ref> |
A similar controversy ensued when Ambrose, in two separate accounts, implied cowardice by a [[United Kingdom|British]] [[coxswain]] of a landing craft during the landings at [[Omaha Beach]]. One writer claimed that the first account was drawn from a work by [[S.L.A. Marshall]].<ref name="wc" /> The second of Ambrose's two accounts may{{weasel-inline}} have been drawn from the oral history of an infantryman who claimed publicly that when the coxswain of a landing craft tried to lower the ramp 100 yards from shore and begin offloading, a sergeant held a gun to the coxswain's head and ordered him to go in farther.<ref>C-SPAN recording of Sgt Slaughter at the Eisenhower Center, New Orleans, May 1994</ref> |
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In December, 2000, |
In December, 2000, three long time [[Overland Route (Union Pacific Railroad)|Pacific Railroad]] history researchers documented in a 25-page paper that Ambrose's book about the building of the [[First Transcontinental Railroad]] entitled ''[[Nothing Like It in the World]]'' contained dozens of "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes"<ref>Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N. [http://utahrails.net/articles/ambrose.php ''The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose''] UtahRails.net, December 19, 2000</ref><ref name="hnn" />, followed on January 1, 2001, by a front page article in ''[[The Sacramento Bee]]'' listing more than 50 pages and six photo captions specifically identified in the researchers' paper in which Ambrose had "erred, misstated the facts, or used quotes that cannot be substantiated with facts."<ref>Matthew Barrows, ''"Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book"''. The ''Sacramento Bee'', January 1, 2001</ref> In addition, on January 11, 2001, [[Lloyd Grove]], a ''[[The Washington Post|Washington Post]]'' columnist, also reported in his column ''The Reliable Source'' that a co-worker found a "serious historical error" in the same book, and that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct the error in new editions.<ref>Grove, Lloyd [http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-421909.html ''"The Reliable Source"''] ''The Washington Post'', January 11, 2001</ref> |
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Although Dr. Ambrose declined to comment on the ''Sacremanto Bee'' article about the researchers' paper when offered the opportunity to do so before the article's publication<ref>Strobridge, Edson [http://hnn.us/articles/541.html ''Stephen Ambrose: Off the Rails''] The History News Network, February 4, 2002</ref>, all of the corrections to the errors identified and documented in their paper were subsequently incorporated by the publisher without comment in later revised printings of the book.<ref>[http://cprr.org/Museum/Books/Comments-Ambrose.html Discussion of ''The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose''] CPRR.org</ref> |
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==Works== |
==Works== |
Revision as of 21:18, 5 May 2010
Stephen Edward Ambrose | |
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2001 premiere of Band of Brothers |
Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a long time professor of history at the University of New Orleans.
Early life
Ambrose was born in Lovington, Illinois, and raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, having graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois, and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He would attend college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a member of the Chi Psi Fraternity.
Ambrose originally wanted to get his major in pre-med, but decided to switch his major to history after hearing his teacher's first lecture in his U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" which he took his sophomore year in college. Ambrose went on to receive his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1960. He served as a professor of history at several universities from 1960 until his retirement in 1995, having spent 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 while teaching at Kansas State University, Ambrose was asked to resign after having heckled President Nixon during a speech that the president gave on the KSU campus. He also taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Career
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. His 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 in the movie Saving Private Ryan and was an executive producer on the television mini-series that was based on his book, Band of Brothers.
In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. The origins of this commission are disputed. In later years Ambrose would often claim that he was solicited by Eisenhower directly after the former president had read and admired Ambrose's life of General Henry Halleck, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. But according to Tim Rives, the deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, it was Ambrose who first made contact with Eisenhower and suggested the project. Ambrose claimed to have spent "hundreds and hundreds of hours" interviewing Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects. A close inspection of the former president's diary and telephone calls suggests, however, that the pair only met three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has suggested that a number of the dates of interviews Ambrose cites in his 1970 book The Supreme Commander cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule. In later works Ambrose was less specific when citing the dates of interviews with Eisenhower.[1]
Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a vehement critic of Nixon, the biography was lauded as being fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.[2] His Band of Brothers (1993) and D-Day (1994), about the lives and fates of individual soldiers in the World War II invasion, placed his works into mainstream American culture. The mini-series "Band of Brothers" (2001) lionized American troops and helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that was stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, and the 60th anniversary in 2004.
Ambrose has received criticism from American veterans. Veterans of troop carrier units that transported paratroopers in the American airborne landings in Normandy have severely criticized Ambrose for portraying them as unqualified and craven in several of his works, including Band of Brothers and D-Day, and for characterizing them as "cranks" when they asked that he change passages.[3]
It is said that Ambrose organized his entire family into a sort of "history factory" and began turning out popular books such as The Wild Blue. In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages that he footnoted, but did not enclose in quotation marks.[4]
Ambrose also appeared as a historian in the 25th episode, "Reckoning," of the ITV television series, The World at War, which details the history of World War II.
In 2001, Ambrose was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Public Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association.[5]
Ambrose, a longtime smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and, seven months after the diagnosis, he died at the age of 66. He was survived by his wife, Moira, and children Andy, Barry, Hugh, Grace, and Stephenie.
Criticism
The Eisenhower Controversy
Two of Ambrose's repeated statements about his interaction with President Eisenhower, chiefly the assertions of Eisenhower's solicitation in 1964 of the historian to write a biography and the claim of Ambrose spending "hundreds of hours" interviewing Eisenhower, have been called into question. Newly discovered evidence has since contradicted these statements.
Evidence reported in the April 26, 2010 [6] issue of The New Yorker shows that it was Ambrose, not Eisenhower, who initiated the contact. This was shown in a letter dated September 10, 1964 found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, in Abilene, Kansas. As for the hours spent with Eisenhower, only five hours can be found where Ambrose met with Eisenhower, and those were with other people present on three separate occasions.
Plagiarism controversy
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).[7] 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.[4][8]
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.[9]
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.[8]
Inaccuracies
Ambrose has also been accused of shoddy research and poor fact checking in his works. In 1995, U.S. Army Air Forces veterans objected to his characterization of C-47 pilots as untrained and incompetent in the Normandy invasion. A letter-writing campaign asserted that Ambrose did not interview a single troop carrier pilot among the 1,642 participating in Operation Neptune, nor did he consult official records, relying instead only on anecdotes of some paratroopers critical of the jumps. It also accused him of reneging on promises to correct the record before his death.[3]
A similar controversy ensued when Ambrose, in two separate accounts, implied cowardice by a British coxswain of a landing craft during the landings at Omaha Beach. One writer claimed that the first account was drawn from a work by S.L.A. Marshall.[3] The second of Ambrose's two accounts may[weasel words] have been drawn from the oral history of an infantryman who claimed publicly that when the coxswain of a landing craft tried to lower the ramp 100 yards from shore and begin offloading, a sergeant held a gun to the coxswain's head and ordered him to go in farther.[10]
In December, 2000, three long time Pacific Railroad history researchers documented in a 25-page paper that Ambrose's book about the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad entitled Nothing Like It in the World contained dozens of "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes"[11][8], followed on January 1, 2001, by a front page article in The Sacramento Bee listing more than 50 pages and six photo captions specifically identified in the researchers' paper in which Ambrose had "erred, misstated the facts, or used quotes that cannot be substantiated with facts."[12] In addition, on January 11, 2001, Lloyd Grove, a Washington Post columnist, also reported in his column The Reliable Source that a co-worker found a "serious historical error" in the same book, and that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct the error in new editions.[13]
Although Dr. Ambrose declined to comment on the Sacremanto Bee article about the researchers' paper when offered the opportunity to do so before the article's publication[14], all of the corrections to the errors identified and documented in their paper were subsequently incorporated by the publisher without comment in later revised printings of the book.[15]
Works
- Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966)
- Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967)
- The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (New York: Doubleday, 1970)
- Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (New York: Doubleday, 1975)
- Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (New York: Doubleday, 1981)
- Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984)
- Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985)
- Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991)
- Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, three volumes, culminating in 1991)
- Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)
- Upton and the Army (Louisiana State University Press, 1993)
- D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1994)
- Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)
- Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)
- Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997)
- Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938 (New York: Penguin Books, 1997)
- Americans at War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997)
- The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998)
- An Epic American Exploration: The friendship of Lewis and Clark (The James Ford Bell Lecture, no. 36. [Minneapolis]: Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, 1998)
- Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999)
- Nothing Like it in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000)
- The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001)
- To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002)
References
- ^ Channelling Ike April 26, 2010
- ^ Neuhaus, Richard J. "Nixon: The Education of a Politician 1913-1962, by Stephen E. Ambrose" (book review), Commentary Magazine, August 1987. "Nixon is competently, sometimes brightly, written, and one gets the impression that Ambrose is striving, above all, to be assiduously fair."
- ^ a b c An Open Letter to the Airborne Community January 17, 2003
- ^ a b As Historian's Fame Grows, So Does Attention to Sources January 11, 2002
- ^ http://data.memberclicks.com/site/tra/Medal_Recipients_up_to_2006.pdf
- ^ Channeling Ike
- ^ PBS News Hour discussion of Plagiarism by historians
- ^ a b c How the Ambrose Story Developed June 2002
- ^ Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis May 10, 2002
- ^ C-SPAN recording of Sgt Slaughter at the Eisenhower Center, New Orleans, May 1994
- ^ Graves, G.J., Strobridge, E.T., & Sweet, C.N. The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose UtahRails.net, December 19, 2000
- ^ Matthew Barrows, "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book". The Sacramento Bee, January 1, 2001
- ^ Grove, Lloyd "The Reliable Source" The Washington Post, January 11, 2001
- ^ Strobridge, Edson Stephen Ambrose: Off the Rails The History News Network, February 4, 2002
- ^ Discussion of The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose CPRR.org
External links
- PBS biography of Ambrose
- Stephen Ambrose at IMDb
- WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
- Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
- Obituary in The Independent
- Ambrose obituary at website of the American Historical Association
- New York Times article on the Ambrose controversy
- How the Ambrose story developed, an account of how the Ambrose controversies played out
- 1936 births
- 2002 deaths
- American military historians
- American historians
- Historians of the American West
- Historians of the United States
- American military writers
- World War II historians
- Writers from Wisconsin
- Writers from Illinois
- Deaths from lung cancer
- University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni
- People from Decatur, Illinois
- People from Whitewater, Wisconsin
- People from New Orleans, Louisiana
- People from Helena, Montana
- Naval War College faculty
- Johns Hopkins University faculty
- Louisiana State University faculty
- University of New Orleans faculty
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Official biographers to the Presidents of the United States