Editing Stephen E. Ambrose (section)

===Plagiarism===
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book ''[[The Wild Blue]]''.<ref>Williams, Robert Chadwell. [https://books.google.com/books?id=DD6GFORubKoC&dq=%22wild+blue+yonder%22+plagiarism+ambrose&pg=PA88 ''The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History''] Armonk NY: M E Sharpe Inc (2003) {{ISBN|0-7656-1093-0}} pp 88-89</ref><ref name="nyt">David D. Kirkpatrick, [https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/11/national/11AMBR.html "As Historian's Fame Grows, So Does Attention to Sources,"] ''New York Times'', January 11, 2002, accessed May 27, 2010.</ref> [[Fred Barnes (journalist)|Fred Barnes]] reported in ''[[The Weekly Standard]]'' 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]].<ref>[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june02/history_1-28.html Writing History] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140118080217/http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june02/history_1-28.html |date=January 18, 2014 }} [[PBS NewsHour]] discussion of plagiarism by historians, January 28, 2002.</ref> Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks numerous passages from Childers's book.<ref name="nyt" /><ref name="hnn">[http://hnn.us/articles/504.html "How the Ambrose Story Developed,"] History News Network, June 2002.</ref>

Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
{{blockquote|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.<ref name="nyt"/>}}

A ''[[Forbes]]'' investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going back to his doctoral dissertation.<ref>Mark Lewis, [https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/10/0510ambrose.html "Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis,"] ''Forbes'', May 10, 2002.</ref> The [[History News Network]] lists seven of Ambrose's more than 69 works—''The Wild Blue'', ''Undaunted Courage'', ''Nothing Like It In the World'', ''Nixon: Ruin and Recovery'', ''Citizen Soldiers'', ''The Supreme Commander'', and ''Crazy Horse and Custer''—contained content from twelve authors without appropriate attribution from Ambrose.<ref name="hnn"/>