To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian » (Reprint)

An historian whose books prompted America to regard its war veterans with newfound reverence, Stephen E. Ambrose was as prolific as he was passionate about his country. His bestsellers chronicled our nation s critical battles and achievements, from his seminal war works D-Day and Band of Brothers to his fitting last love letter To America.

"In To America, Stephen E. Ambrose reflects on his long career as an American historian and explains what an historian's job is all about. He celebrates America's spirit, which has carried us so far. He confronts its failures and struggles. As always in his much acclaimed work, Ambrose brings alive the men and women, famous and not, who have peopled our history and made the United States a model for the world." "Taking a few swings at today's political correctness, as well as his own early biases, Ambrose grapples with the country's historic sins of racism, its neglect and ill treatment of Native Americans, and its tragic errors (such as the war in Vietnam, which he ardently opposed on campus, where he was a professor). He reflects on some of the country's early founders who were progressive thinkers while living a contradiction as slaveholders, great men such as Washington and Jefferson. He contemplates the genius of Andrew Jackson's defeat of a vastly superior British force with a ragtag army in the War of 1812. He describes the grueling journey that Lewis and Clark made to open up the country, and the building of the railroad that joined it and produced great riches for a few barons." Ambrose explains the misunderstood presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, records the country's assumption of world power under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, and extols its heroic victory of World War II. He writes about women's rights and civil rights and immigration, founding museums, and nation-building. He contrasts the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Throughout, Ambrose celebrates the unflappable American spirit.

Book Magazine

Ambrose died in October, just as his last book, an informal, almost chatty quasi-memoir, was going to press. In it, the author of D-Day and Band of Brothers talks about what he wrote, why he wrote it and how he changed along the way. He writes candidly about his evolution from an antiwar academic leftist into something like (but not quite) a conservative, and his simultaneous transformation from a relatively obscure Eisenhower biographer into a titan of the bestseller lists. Along the way he lets fly with some startling bursts of political incorrectness: "It is easy today to sit back and criticize the United States for its treatment of the Indians, or the individual settlers and frontiersmen for what they did to the Native Americans, but for them the choices were to go back to where they came from or to go forward and seize what they wanted or needed." Alas, Ambrose says nothing about the charges of plagiarism that darkened his final months, or the widespread feeling among colleagues that his work became less serious as it grew more popular. Instead, the flag-waving historian tells a story that sums him up well: "In 1996 I taught a course on World War II at the University of Wisconsin ... [and] a young woman student came up to me to say, 'You are the first professor I've had in four years in Madison to teach me the meaning and value of patriotism.' I like to think that Ike would have nodded his approval." Very likely.