Stephen E. Ambrose life and biography

Stephen Edward Ambrose 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 and the author of many best selling volumes of American popular history.

CAREER:

A college football player who played in the Rose Bowl, Ambrose received a PhD in History from Wisconsin and embarked upon a career writing over two dozen history books, including lengthy biographies and works intended for the popular audience. Many of the works were on matters of military history, and in 1998 he consulted with Steven Spielberg for the ultraviolent Saving Private Ryan.

A scandal arose when apparent plagiarism was noticed several of his works. The portions in question were not quoted but they were footnoted, so this puts him in a murky gray area but not an actual plagiarist. In a letter he noted that the sum total of such material amounted to 10 pages of a total volume of over 15,000. In general however, particularly his later works revealed very little new scholarship.

Author of books:

Eisenhower and Berlin 1945 (1967, history)
Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy 1938-70 (1970, history, with Douglas Brinkley)
Eisenhower (1983-4, biography, 2 volumes)
Nixon (1987-90, biography, 3 volumes)
D-Day June 6, 1944 (1994, history)
Undaunted Courage (1996, history, on Lewis and Clark)
Citizen Soldiers (1997, history)
The Victors (1998, history)
Nothing Like It in the World (2000, history)
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 (2001, history)
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (2002, memoir)

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