AS FRED BARNES reported in our cover story last week, bestselling historian Stephen Ambrose lifted the words of historian Thomas Childers and published them as his own. Ambrose subsequently apologized to Childers for the unacknowledged debt that "The Wild Blue" owes to "Wings of Morning" (both are histories of B-24 crews in World War II). But--as is almost always the case with sticky-fingered writers--this turns out not to have been an isolated incident. Ambrose is a repeat offender. The Weekly Standard has been besieged in the past week with e-mails, phone calls, and letters pointing to a number of books in which Ambrose recycles other authors' prose without benefit of quotation marks. Some of these instances were reported this week by Mark Lewis of Forbes.com and by the New York Times. One turns out to have been the subject of a review in the autumn 1997 issue of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. There, reviewer Turk McCleskey of the Virginia Military Institute commented on Ambrose's 1996 history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, "Undaunted Courage": [Ambrose's book] represents itself as a deeply researched and carefully documented narrative, but on closer scrutiny, "Undaunted Courage" only repackages other people's work. Adding nothing substantially new, Ambrose uncritically skates across the preceding literature. . . . Most of Ambrose's citations do point to more reputable scholarly sources, but not always precisely. Indeed, Ambrose's debt to his predecessors leaves him open to charges of sloppy paraphrasing, as with this wanly cited echo of Dumas Malone: "In a country of vast estates, without cities or public transportation of any kind, with plantation seats far apart, riding was not a matter of sport or diversion but of necessity. . . . Good horsemanship was taken for granted among the gentry" (Ambrose, p. 30). Malone wrote: "In a country without large settlements and where plantation seats were far apart, riding was not a matter of occasional diversion but of daily necessity, and good horsemanship was taken for granted among the gentry" (Dumas Malone, "Jefferson and His Time," vol. 1: "Jefferson the Virginian," p. 46). In addition, as reported by Forbes: -Ambrose's 1975 "Crazy Horse and Custer" lifted passages from Jay Monaghan's 1959 "Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer." -Ambrose's 1997 "Citizen Soldiers" borrowed from Joseph Balkoski's 1989 "Beyond the Beachhead." -Ambrose's 1991 "Ruin and Recovery" borrowed from Robert Sam Anson's 1984 "Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon." Both these books were edited by Simon & Schuster's Alice Mayhew. Finally, according to the New York Times, in "The Wild Blue" Ambrose "acknowledged using sentences verbatim and in at least five cases closely echoed the language and structure of longer passages from both the Army's official seven-volume study, "The Army Air Forces in World War II," by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate (University of Chicago, 1949) and "The Rise of American Air Power," by Michael S. Sherry (Yale University Press, 1987)." Not all of Ambrose's problems involve copying other authors' work. In his 1966 book "Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point," he wrote of a Capt. John Lillie "who upon hearing Lt. Robert W. Osborn accuse him of stealing public property had died of an apoplectic fit." Lillie's descendants disputed the matter, first demanding Ambrose's source, then, when neither he nor military record-keepers could come up with one, seeking a retraction. Ambrose grudgingly apologized in 1978. His publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, agreed in 1979 to delete the passage in subsequent printings of the book. Ambrose's defenders, including his publisher, intimate that leaving out quotation marks might be a kind of streamlining of the production process, a side effect of high productivity. Are they sorry about that? Hardly. "We welcome the fact that he is prolific," David Rosenthal, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, told the New York Times. "He works at a schedule that he sets, and we encourage the amount of his output because there is a readership that wants it."