Lewis and Clark, What a Waste of Money!

[NutWrench]

I didn’t like it either. I always thought Lexx Luthor was totally uncovincing in that series.

[ScottieBoy]

I really think it’s in the past. 200 years ago is pretty far in the past to be worrying about the Louisiana Purchase. But whatever:)

[mhendo]

*Originally posted by Washte *
**This was news to me as in the UK he is an unknown, so there was no news to these allegations. I was also unaware he had passed away. What a loss, he was a good writer.

The man admitted his error, in context a snippet from thousands of pages.

Whilst I’m not arguing he didn’t make a mistake, it still remains that the book I mentioned is a bloody good book.**

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but his plagiarism constituted a lot more than “a snippet from thousands of pages.” Here is a quotation from the History News Network, written early in 2002 when the controversy was at its peak:

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. Now evidence is accumulating that he may be a serial plagiarist. The media have reported that he “borrowed” whole paragraphs from other authors in many books over a period of decades.

Ambrose has apologized for misappropriating other peoples’ words, but the practice apparently was deliberate. 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.”

If you’re interested, go to the link i’ve provided and see the hundreds of comments by history professors, schoolteachers, students, and members of the general public regarding Ambrose’s work. While some adopt the position that criticizing him is just professional jealousy, most seem to concur that the type of behaviour that Ambrose admitted to constitutes a clear case of plagiarism. I agree with many on that board that, if the undergraduates in any of my classes used the same tactics in producing a term paper, they would fail the course and have an academic misconduct report appear on their permanent record; a second offence would result in expulsion from the university. Surely we should hold a multi-millionaire historical author like Ambrose up to the same standards that we expect of 18 year old students?

After Ambrose died, Slate.com pointed out how his plagiarism had been glossed over in the “tongue bath obituaries” given to him by much of the mainstream media. The Associated Press obituary, according to Slate, “allots more space to Ambrose’s belligerent rebuttal than to the actual theft.” Slate goes on to say:

But Ambrose’s pilferage was much more than a slip-up in a “couple of books.” As the Weekly Standard, Forbes.com, and New York Times proved in one damning week last January, Ambrose plagiarized all the time. He did it when he was writing books quickly at the end of his career (the vast ripped-off swathes of recent best-seller The Wild Blue), and he did it when he was writing books slowly at the beginning of his career (his 1975 Crazy Horse and Custer steals from earlier Custer bios). He did it in more academic histories (Nixon: Ruin and Recovery) and in populist best sellers (Citizen Soldiers). He claims he footnoted the victims and merely forgot quotation marks, but no one reads footnotes, and by heisting memorable, vivid prose, Ambrose passed himself off as a better writer than he was. The hunt for Ambrose’s plagiarism was called off quickly because news broke of his lung cancer. But there’s good reason to believe that the shoplifting discovered in five books that were checked might also be found in the 30 other books that haven’t been. Plagiarists repeat themselves.

And, in case you think that all the criticism of Ambrose came from big-shot media types and jealous professors, this website lists the errors found in his work by WWII veterans, many of whom complain that Ambrose asked for their input, and then ignored them when they tried to point out basic errors of fact.

While some of this stuff might seem trivial, it goes to a broader pattern of behaviour. The veterans accused Ambrose of exaggeration when he said in one book that “The [troop carrier] pilots were afraid.” The vets don’t dispute that some pilots were afraid, but they object to the generalization, and the fact that it remained uncorrected in the book even though Ambrose admitted “I did not interview any troop carrier pilots for my book.” The list goes on.

This website contains an accounting of the errors and problems in Ambrose’s book about the transcontinental railroad, Nothing Like It in the World. Again, these are not comments by gnarled, bitter professors, but by amateur railroad historians and railroad buffs - the type of general audience Ambrose sought with his work.

I’ve followed this whole story since it broke, both in the regular media and in the history profession’s journals and websites. It seems clear to me that Ambrose made quite a habit of lifting the work of others and dropping it straight into his books, sometimes slightly changed but often unaltered. He neglected the quotation marks that should accompany such pilfering, and even his footnote references do not excuse his behaviour, because by taking the writing of others he passed himself off as a better author than he actually was. If you want to trace the evolution of the story, go to this History News Network page.

I’ll finish off with an example, from that same page, which deals with the book you liked so much:

In the January 21 edition of the Weekly Standard (available online the week before), the editors reported learning that in 1997 Turk McCleskey (Virginia Military Institute) charged that Mr. Ambrose’s adventure book about Lewis and Clark, Undaunted Courage , is a compilation of other people’s work. “Adding nothing substantially new,” McClesky wrote in a review of the book published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (Autumn, 1997), “Ambrose uncritically skates across the preceding literature. . . . Most of Ambrose’s citations do point to more reputable scholarly sources, but not always precisely. Indeed, Ambrose’s debt to his predecessors leaves him open to charges of sloppy paraphrasing, as with this wanly cited echo of Dumas Malone: ‘In a country of vast estates, without cities or public transportation of any kind, with plantation seats far apart, riding was not a matter of sport or diversion but of necessity. . . . Good horsemanship was taken for granted among the gentry’ (Ambrose, p. 30). Malone wrote: ‘In a country without large settlements and where plantation seats were far apart, riding was not a matter of occasional diversion but of daily necessity, and good horsemanship was taken for granted among the gentry.’” The quotation from Malone appears in his six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson the Virginian (1948), p. 46.)