Stephen E. Ambrose

Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian and author whose work focused particularly on World War II, the American West, and the lives of U.S. presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He taught history from 1960 until his retirement in 1995 and was a member of the University of New Orleans faculty from 1971, becoming Boyd Professor of History in 1989. He also founded the university's Eisenhower Center and co-founded the National D-Day Museum, later designated the National World War II Museum. Ambrose's books included The Supreme Commander and a two-volume biography of Eisenhower, a three-volume biography of Nixon, Band of Brothers (1992), D-Day (1994), Undaunted Courage (1996), Citizen Soldiers (1997), Nothing Like It in the World (2000), and The Wild Blue (2001). D-Day became his first bestseller, while Citizen Soldiers and Undaunted Courage also appeared on The New York Times best-seller lists. He received the National Humanities Medal and the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize in 1998, among other awards. Ambrose's work was also the subject of controversies over plagiarism and historical accuracy. Several of his books were found to contain plagiarized passages, with a Forbes investigation tracing the pattern back to his doctoral dissertation. After his death, presidential library records contradicted his claims of having conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Eisenhower, showing that the two had met only three times for fewer than five hours in total; this led several historians to conclude that Ambrose had fabricated interviews and exaggerated his access.