Student says she uncovered more problems in historian's work

ST. LOUIS -- A history student at Washington University says a paper she wrote three years ago identified improper use of source material in "Undaunted Courage," one of historian Stephen Ambrose's most popular books.

The accusation, reported Sunday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, adds to the list of books in which Ambrose is accused of failing to provide proper credit for the use of some material. At least six other books by Ambrose have been questioned.

Lara Marks, a senior at the private university, said she wrote the paper for a class on Lewis and Clark's expedition of the Louisiana Purchase, the subject of "Undaunted Courage." The paper cited three passages in the best seller that are similar to earlier works, but are not noted in a footnote or surrounded by quotation marks. In one of the passages, Ambrose wrote: "A band of Sauks rode twice a year through a territory as big as an eastern state and claimed it as their own."

That's similar to a section of "Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello," edited by Donald Jackson; "A bank of Sauks, say, rode twice a year through a tract as big as a couple of eastern states and claimed it as their own."

An e-mail sent by the Post-Dispatch seeking comment from Ambrose was returned by his office with a statement from a man who wrote to Ambrose attached. It read, in part, "people use the word 'plagiarism' much too quickly."

'My fault, my mistake'

Ambrose was in St. Louis last week to deliver a speech, where he admitted taking several sentences in his books from other authors, but said his footnotes adequately attributed the material.

"There are something like six or seven sentences in three or four of my books that are the sentences of other writers," Ambrose said. "I know they are, and now reporters know they are, and now the whole world knows they are because I put footnotes behind those sentences and cited where I got this from. What I had failed to do -- and this was my fault, my mistake -- was to put quotation marks around those six or seven sentences."

Ambrose has also blamed errors on his quick pace; he has published an average of more than a book a year since the mid-1990s.

Marks said her 12-page paper mentioned the three passages only briefly. Its overall theme suggested Ambrose made the narrative more exciting with less than accurate reporting of the facts.

"The point that I made in my paper," Marks said, was that Ambrose "made this book seem as if it was a history book, but in reality he twisted history."

Marks was an intern at the Eisenhower Center for American Studies, a center at the University of New Orleans founded by Ambrose, last summer. She never met the historian while there, but said she would have been too intimidated to confront him with her findings.

The other works under scrutiny are: "The Supreme Commander," "Nothing Like It in the World," "Citizen Soldiers," Vol. III of Ambrose's Richard Nixon trilogy, "Crazy Horse and Custer," and "The Wild Blue," his latest best seller.