Stephen Edward Ambrose was born in 1936. He was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. He was a long time professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many best selling volumes of American popular history. Beginning late in his life and continuing after his death, however, controversial reports surfaced suggesting long time patterns of plagiarism, falsification, and inaccuracies in many of his published writings and other work. In response to one of the early reports, Ambrose said he was not "out there stealing other people's writings." His international bestseller Band of Brothers is now a series produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. Ambrose died in October 2002.