Students who try this (and get caught) in my courses flunk the entire course. Without quotation marks to indicate precisely what words a footnote refers to, this is plagiarism pure and simple. As an intelligent guy, he should have assumed that the popularity of his books would have drawn scrutiny. Would any decent history professor excuse a student who repeatedly copied whole paragraphs from books into her papers and passed them off as her own words? The more interesting question is why Ambrose did it.

Stephen Ambrose's books,like Ken Burns's films, are absolutely essential tools in the daily fight to bring history alive for the MTV generation. I wish that some of those who are hitting Ambrose so hard would spend a few years at the grassroots of history education in American high schools and see how difficut it is to engage students in the subject. Only David McCullough remains for them, and I expect that he is high on their hit list. The eggheads have already done their job on Ken Burns and now, Stephen Ambrose. No wonder the'social sciences' have eclipsed pure history in our secondary schools. However, the cynics will now make try to mincemeat of all of his work, and the kids will have yet another example of how how all history is really just fiction after all. I do not see much good coming from trashing Stephen Ambrose unless it is as a point of caution to those instructing students on the requisites of meticulous citation of sources and the price one pays for sloppy attribution. Is this plagiarism? We asked HNN readers to comment. According to the New York Times, Ambrose admitted that'if he came across passages from another author that fit the story he was telling, he would drop the passages into his text and credit the book in footnotes.' The media have reported that he'borrowed' whole paragraphs from other authors in many books over a period of decades.Īmbrose has apologized for misappropriating other peoples' words, but the practice apparently was deliberate. Now evidence is accumulating that he may be a serial plagiarist. Is the Ambrose story bigger than it appeared at first? Initially, Ambrose's chief offense seemed to be that he had simply forgotten to put quotation marks around a few select sentences.

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