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with adjectives, as they are but the salt and pepper for the meat (nouns).
On his cancer, May 1902: ?Like millions of other Americans, I have been diagnosed with cancer. Since I just learned about my illness last Friday, I am still getting used to the idea. ... I have spent a good part of my career studying men and women who faced uncertainty about the future. Now I find myself facing a great challenge, and I am focusing on a course of action based on a balance of good sense and cautious optimism. I have a lot left to say and to write about our nation?s history, the American spirit and personal leadership. I will take heart from the lessons I?ve learned over the years from these experiences as I deal with my own future.?
On teaching vs. writing: ?Teaching and writing are one to me ? in each case I am telling a story. As I sit at my computer, or stand at the podium, I think of myself as sitting around the campfire after a day on the trail, telling stories that I hope will have the members of the audience, or the readers, leaning forward just a bit, wanting to know what happens next.?
On learning Latin: ?I
was born in 1936 and grew up in Whitewater, Wis., a small town where my father was the M.D. My high school had only 300 students but was good enough to offer two years of Latin, which taught me the centrality of verbs -placement, form, tense.?
Hugh.
For much of his career, Ambrose was a little-known history professor. He burst onto the best-sellers list less than a decade ago with his 1994 book ?D-Day June 6,1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.?
Based largely in part on interviews with veterans about their combat experiences, the book recounted the chaotic, bloody beach invasions of Normandy from the American soldier?s perspective.
?He was saying, There?s all this obsession with high command, but the real story is these citizen soldiers who still live in every town and hamlet in the United States,? ? said Douglas
Please see Ambrose, B-2
Mississippians gladly claimed Ambrose
By KAT BERGERON
THE SUN HERALD
Stephen Ambrose divided his time between Mississippi and Montana, two distinctly different locales that fed the writing muse within him. He discovered Bay St Louis because of his years of university teaching in nearby New Orleans, and there he lived and wrote in a two-story clapboard house by the sea.
He often admitted, ?Whenever my eyes come up from the typewriter, they go directly to the water.?
The locals on the Mississippi Coast loved having this Wisconsin native in their midst
Mississippians all over loved to claim him on their long list of famous authors.
Historians and teachers used his work to broaden young people?s minds
?	and their own.
Stephen Ambrose?s death from lung cancer came too soon, they all say, although he does leave a legacy of history research that will be absorbed by generations yet to come. He made learning about the past and its people interesting.
?Stephen Ambrose is one of the giants in American history,? said Elbert Hilliard, Ph.D., director of the Mississippi Department of Archives & History. ?As a historian, he did a great deal to make history come alive for the average citizen, that plus the leadership roles in such things as The National D-Day Museum in New Orleans that remind us of the great sacrifices service men and women made.
?One of the regrets I have is that I never met him.?
This year, Ronnie Musgrove presented him the Governor?s Award for Excellence in the Arts for Lifetime Achievement Earlier, the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters gave him an award for his book on the Lewis and Clark expedition. Of
DAVID PURDY/THE SUN HERALD
Stephen Ambrose, founder of The National D-Day Museum, left, talks with World War II veteran B.J. Oram at a preview of the new Pacific Wing of the museum in New Orleans in December 2001. Ambrose died early Sunday in Bay St. Louis after a brief illness.
course, he had many other awards and honors to his name.
?Stephen Ambrose did an incredible service in popularizing history,? said James ?Pat? Smith, Ph.D., a history professor at University of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast.
Smith met Ambrose in 1997 when he lectured in the ?Visions Through Leadership? series. For his talk, Ambrose drew upon his research of the junior officers who survived D-Day, and of such men with courage as Dwight Eisenhower and Meriweather Lewis.
?Something he said has stuck with me,? Smith said, ?and that is that success in leadership often has to do with the perception that the leader is committed absolutely, that a successful leader has the charisma and ability to provoke commitment, even to the death, in others. If you get a wishy-washy leader, you get a wishy-washy commitment ?It was Steven Ambrose?s understanding of all these people he wrote about that is an important part of the history legacy he leaves us.?
?	?Lewis & Clark: Voyage of Discovery,?
1998.
?	?The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys, the Men of World War II,? 1998.
?	?Americans At War,? 1997.
?	?Rise To Glo-balism: American Foreign Policy from 1938 to 1997? (eighth revised edition with Douglas Brinkley), 1997.
?	?Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7,1944-May 7, 1945,? 1997.
?	?American Heritage New History of World War II? (original text by C. L. Sulzberger, revised and updated), 1997.
?	?Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West,? 1996.
?	?D-Day June 6,1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II,? 1994.
?	?Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne From Normandy to Hitler?s Eagle?s Nest,? 1992.
?	?Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood,? 1992.
?	?Nixon: The Ruin and Recovery of a Politician, 1973-1990,? 1991.
? ?Eisenhower: Soldier and President,? 1990. I
?	?Nixon: The / Triumph of a Polt tician, 1962-1972,? 1989.
?	?Nixon: Th> Education of a ! Politician, 191J 1962,? 1987/