McCabe is curator of manuscripts for the Archives and Special Collections division at the university's Alden Library in Athens, Ohio, where the Cornelius Ryan Collection is housed.

'It brings into question all his professional work,' McCabe says. , an archivist who oversees the Cornelius Ryan Collection at Ohio University, it demonstrates that Ambrose's attribution problems go back almost to the beginning of his scholarly career. Ryan's complaint may seem relatively minor, but to The Ryan situation is somewhat different, since Ambrose is not accused of presenting Ryan's words as his own, but of denying Ryan proper attribution.

The critics note that college students are forbidden to do what Ambrose does when they write research papers, so why should Ambrose-a former history professor-get away with it in his books? Critics respond that footnoting 'borrowed' passages isn't good enough, since the words still are being presented to the reader as having been written by Ambrose himself. He has had relatively little to say since accusations surfaced earlier this month that he has borrowed phrases and passages from certain sources over the years without putting the words within quotation marks-a practice that many of Ambrose's critics consider a form of plagiarism.Īmbrose has pointed out in his own defense that he footnotes the passages in question and then cites the sources in his endnotes. But when the Ambrose book in question, The Supreme Commander, was republished in 1999, the garble had been fixed but the attribution still omitted any mention of Ryan or The Last Battle.Īmbrose did not return a phone call today seeking comment. , accusing Ambrose of 'a rather graceless falsification which concerns me and my book, The Last Battle.' Ryan complained that Ambrose, in a 1970 book about Dwight Eisenhower, had copied two quotations from The Last Battle without attributing them to Ryan's earlier book-and had garbled the quotations to boot.Īmbrose, in a reply to Ryan written later that same month, apologized for the 'careless error' and said he would fix it in future editions. Four years earlier, in September 1970, he had written a letter to Ambrose's then-publisher, Ryan, the best-selling author of A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day, died in 1974.

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