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Stephen Ambrose




Dr. 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 . He grew up in Whitewater , Walworth County , Wisconsin and graduated from Whitewater High School . He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University Of Wisconsin-Madison .

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 . At one of his stops, in 1970 , he was driven from his position at Kansas State University after heckling then-President Richard Nixon during a speech on campus.

Early in his career Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue , and he was the author of numerous bestselling books about the war, including '' D-Day '', '' Citizen Soldiers '' and '' The Victors .'' Other major works 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 work, '' Band Of Brothers ''.

Eisenhower chose Ambrose as his Biographer after admiring his work on ''Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff'', which was based on his doctoral dissertation. The resulting Eisenhower biographies were generally enthusiastic, but contained many criticisms of the former commander in chief.

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.

Ambrose organized his entire family into a sort of "history factory" and began turning out popular books of history like '''', 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."

A heavy smoker for years, 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 .

Ambrose has appeared on and even been the feature of several Documentaries — notably ABC 's '' The Century '', A&E 's '' Biography '' and the acclaimed series The World At War . (Full filmography at IMDb ).


BIBLIOGRAPHY

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