Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America's Wild Frontier

A prolific historian and bestselling author, Ambrose (1936-2002) was known for his accessible narrative style, patriotic but not uncritical tone, and deep interest in American expansionism and military history. He held a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught at several universities, including the University of New Orleans. Much of Ambrose’s work, ranging from his most famous work, Band of Brothers, to his biographies of Eisenhower and Nixon, focuses on American leadership in moments of national trial or triumph. Undaunted Courage, first published in 1996, continues that thematic preoccupation by elevating Meriwether Lewis as a figure of individual heroism, while exploring the broader, more troubled notions of Jefferson’s legacy and Manifest Destiny.

Ambrose’s Band of Brothers, which tells the story of a single parachute infantry company as it participates in the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II, was adapted into a popular HBO miniseries on which Ambrose served as executive producer. He later served as a commentator for Ken Burns’s PBS documentary Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, which drew in part from Undaunted Courage.

Though his work reaches a much wider audience than that of most historians, Ambrose’s career is not without controversy. A 2002 investigation by Forbes magazine found that Ambrose had plagiarized passages in at least six books. Shortly after his death, he was also found to have exaggerated the closeness of his relationship with Dwight D. Eisenhower in his two-volume biography of the former president, fabricating both events and interviews.

Ambrose’s belief in American exceptionalism informs his portrayal of Lewis and Clark as pioneers in both the geographic and ideological sense, embodying Enlightenment ideals of rationality, discovery, and progress. However, his depiction of Lewis is layered and ultimately tragic: a gifted but flawed man brought down by mental health challenges and political disappointment. Ambrose’s access to the original expedition journals, coupled with his research into Jeffersonian policy and western expansion, provides a firm scholarly foundation for the narrative.