redman said:
beer 30 said:
He also has disdain for Ambrose and his “historical” writings (he has been accused of plagiarism in the past with some very damning evidence).
What Ambrose to my understanding was accused of was non-attribution, which certainly was a form of plagiarism, but he wasn't quoting entire sections, word for word, like some have in recent years, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin.
I don't want to hijack this thread so I'll leave it alone after this post:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Publ...00/738lfddv.asp
IN 1995, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Childers, published a book about his uncle's B-24 crew in World War II. Entitled "Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II," the book was well received by critics. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post called it "powerful and unselfconsciously beautiful." It sold fifteen thousand copies in hardcover and remains available in paperback.
In 2001, Stephen Ambrose, perhaps America's most popular historian and one of its most prolific, also published a book that focuses on a B-24 crew in World War II. This crew's pilot was George McGovern, later a senator and Democratic presidential candidate. Entitled "The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany," the book got mixed reviews. But it nonetheless rose quickly on the best-seller list, ranking twelfth on last week's New York Times non-fiction list. The first printing was half a million copies.
The two books are similar in more than just subject. Whole passages in "The Wild Blue" are barely distinguishable from those in "Wings of Morning." Sentences in Ambrose's book are identical to sentences in Childers's. Key phrases from "Wings of Morning," such as "glittering like mica" and "up, up, up," are repeated verbatim in "The Wild Blue." None of these--the passages, sentences, phrases--is put in quotation marks and ascribed to Childers. The only attribution Childers gets in "The Wild Blue" is a mention in the bibliography and four footnotes. And the footnotes give no indication that an entire passage has been lifted with only a few alterations from "Wings of Morning" or that a Childers sentence has been copied word-for-word. So, for example, one six-paragraph passage in "The Wild Blue" is structured like the corresponding section of "Wings of Morning," with ten sentences nearly identical to sentences in Childers's book and one completely identical. All this is dealt with in a single footnote that cites pages 21 to 27 in "Wings of Morning" with no further explanation or credit.
http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com/me...m-2158919.shtml
Stephen Ambrose, the well- known historian who recently admitted using wording similar to that in passages of Penn History Professor Thomas Childers' Wings of Morning in his Wild Blue, has been accused of borrowing passages from the late Jay Monaghan's Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer.
Forbes magazine is reporting that in his 1975 book Crazy Horse and Custer, Ambrose used similar phrases to those written in Monaghan's 1959 work. The new accusation comes just one day after the publication of a Weekly Standard article in which Ambrose is accused of plagiarizing Childers' work.
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Again, don't mean a hill of beans to me as I'm fairly certain he was the only one who wrote BoB although some of his facts in the book and mini-series thereafter were wrong as well, most notably Albert Blithe dying shortly after he was wounded in France. This was due mainly to the members of E Company not knowing what happened to him after he was wounded but he did stay in the service and went on to fight in Korea and achieve the rank of Master Sergent.