THE STEPHEN E. AMBROSE ORAL HISTORY AWARD is presented annually by The Rutgers University Living History Society to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the practice and/or use of oral history. The award is named for the late historian and author Stephen E. Ambrose, who helped guide the Rutgers Oral History Archives program at its inception in 1994 and who served on its Academic Advisory Board for the balance of his life.
Daniel James Brown is the recipient of the 2025 Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award. He is the award-winning and bestselling author of Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II and The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
[Shaun Illingworth] Good morning everyone. This is Shaun Illingworth, and I'm coming to you from the Class of 1948 Recording Booth at the Rutgers Oral History Archives Center. It is my pleasure to now present this year's Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award to renowned writer Daniel James Brown. Dan, you have earned this award due to your extensive use of oral histories and other first-person perspectives in your works. You now join the many other writers, academics, filmmakers, and oral historians who have received this prestigious award for advancing the use of oral history in telling captivating stories from our past. Congratulations! and now I believe you have a few comments to share with our attendees.
[Daniel James Brown] Well, thank you, Shaun, and my apologies for not being there in person. I would've preferred that. Travel to the East Coast has just become really difficult for me, so I appreciate this opportunity to do this virtually. Yeah, I have a few remarks I'd I'd like to make.
First, I’d just like to thank the committee for bestowing this honor on me. It’s particularly meaningful for me because, of course, it has its roots in Stephen Ambrose’s work. I’ve been writing narrative history for almost twenty-five years now. My impetus for beginning to doing so was really my admiration for a number of books published in the late 90s and early 2000s— among them Laura Hillenbrand’s SEABISCUIT, Erik Laron’s ISAAC’S STORM, Nathaniel Philbrick’s IN THE HEART OF THE SEA, and, of course, UNDAUNTED COURAGE. So I have long considered myself indebted to Mr. Ambrose as well as the others I’ve mentioned, both for giving me the inspiration to make the attempt and also for teaching me so much about how to go about writing this sort of history.
Now I’d like to say just a few words about my use of oral histories in particular. I’ve published four books over that twenty-five-year span, and all of them have been built primarily on a foundation of oral histories, either those assembled in an earlier era or those I’ve been able to collect myself. My first book—UNDER A FLAMING SKY—began with my close perusal of a book titled MEMORIALS OF THE MINNESOTA FOREST FIRES IN THE YEAR 1894 by William Wilkinson. That book is a compendium of first-hand, eye-witness accounts, collected immediately after the great Hinckley Firestorm of the same year. My second book—THE INDIFFERENT STARS ABOVE—sprang originally from my reading of a book titled HISTORY OF THE DONNER PARTY, by C.F. McGlashan, published in 1879, again a compendium of first-hand accounts provided, sometimes reluctantly by survivors of that tragedy. My third book—THE BOYS IN THE BOAT—was built mostly on my own interviews with the principals in the story and even more with their close family members. And my fourth book—FACING THE MOUNTAIN—grew out of and is built on dozens of video-recorded oral histories collected by my friend Tom Ikeda and made available to the public on his web site at Densho.org. And by the way, Tom is a remarkable interviewer and if you have any interest in the experience of Japanese Americans during the World War II years you will not regret any time you spend with those oral histories. Now my research for all these books also included many other types of sources, of course—newspaper articles, scientific data, other books, military records, correspondence, and so on—but first-hand accounts are at the heart of each of them, and each of them would, in my opinion, have considerably less heart if they’d been constructed any other way.
And it’s heart I’d like to make a point of today. In this time we are living through, when history—factual history—is under assault, when books are banned for ideological reasons, when uncomfortable narratives are suppressed, when false historical narratives are promoted for political reasons, facts and the truth have never been so important. Now we all know that oral histories themselves are not always factual. They may be riddled with mis-remembering, with conflation, and with the speaker’s own agenda or biases. And so the honest writer’s task is to hold those first-hand accounts up to the light, to test them against other sources of information, to discern what is and isn’t true. The writer must discard what is untrue, but at the same time recognize that just because an account may be in part be untrue that same account may, and often does, contain emotional truths that must not be discarded, that are in fact the most valuable parts of the account. For history has to be more than the telling of facts. It must also capture the human element, the truths that transcend the facts and speak directly to the human heart.
Only the eyewitness who has lived through a true firestorm can really know and therefore tell us what it is like to see and hear a tornado of fire rip through one’s hometown. Only someone who has been snowbound and come to the very edge of starvation can convey to us what that feels like. Only someone who has won an Olympic gold medal can share that level of exultations with us. And only someone who has watched her grandmother being taken away and incarcerated in a bleak concentration camp can move us to understand her pain.
When I was researching The Boys in the Boat my principal source—by far and away the person I spent the most time interviewing—was Joe Rantz’s daughter, Judy. Judy had spent the last several years of her father’s life questioning him, taking notes, and recording in minute detail the circumstances of his life growing up during the Depression, his experiences learning to row crew at the University of Washington, and the crew’s triumphant gold-medal win at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. So in the many hours I spent with Judy she was able to provide me with a cornucopia of facts, anecdotes, and insights into Joe’s character, the world he lived in, and his unique experiences. But here’s the thing. In almost every session I spent with Judy there came a point at which she suddenly choked up, tears came to her eyes, and she had to pause before continuing. And those moments were like gold to me. Those were the moments when I could feel Joe’s humanity—his hopes and fears—most acutely. And those were the moments that I knew I needed to come back to, to probe gently, and to understand completely if I were to tell the story well. Because that was where the heart lay.
The great, enduring value of oral histories is that at some point someone has sat down, looked into someone else’s eyes, asked that someone for their story, and captured at least a slice of the human condition. And that is what writing history is all about.
So again, thank you so much for your appreciation of my work and for bestowing this honor on me. It means a great deal to me.
Thank you.
[SI] Thank you very much for those moving remarks. Now I'd like to ask you a few questions. What did you do before you became a history writer? How did you make the transition to full-time history writing?
[DJB] So I was, I was an English major in college, and I got an MA in English literature, and literature was really my passion. I didn't read a lot of history when I was at university, so I wound up teaching college English for 12, 15 years. And then, when I got married, and my wife was pregnant, we needed a little more income than I could make teaching, so I wound up working as a technical editor and writer, first in Silicon Valley and then at Microsoft. So I did that for quite a few years and, and, and so I made the transition to, to becoming a writer of history in those last couple of years I was working as a technical editor. I just wanted to see if I could write history. My grandfather had lived through this terrible fire in Minnesota in the 1890s, and I, I knew my mother had told me that story and, and she had a box of old clippings and, and documents and this book that I mentioned in the talk. So I just sat down and I got immersed in that particular historical event. And really without knowing anything more about how to get a book published or anything, I just, I went to Minnesota, I started researching it, and I just, over a course of two years, I just sort of wrote the book, not knowing that I needed an agent and a publisher and all that to actually get it into the world. And then, but eventually, I found an agent, and she sold that book for a very small amount of money. And, and that's really how it, it took off to my, it was really intended as sort of a hobby, but it, it took off that that book did reasonably well. It got the attention of a bigger publisher, and, and so things just sort of turned, turned on and got rolling at that point. And it became a career that I hadn't really expected, but I've enjoyed it very much.
[SI] Do you have a particular approach to your research and writing?
[DJB] Yeah, you know, I always hesitate to recommend my writing process to any, but because it's, it's very messy and chaotic and it's not very efficient. That said, I do sort of have some basic, basic sort of process I go through. I always start once I am pretty committed to writing a particular story or book. I generally start by spending quite a bit of time just constructing a timeline of every event from the beginning of the story to the end of the story. That sometimes takes me a year or more doing research, finding all the key points in the story, and putting them on a timeline. And then I, at some point, I stand back from that, and I look at the timeline, I look at the arc of the story, and I start pulling out the most essential points in the story. So I'm not necessarily including, in fact, I'm not including most of what's on my timeline usually, but I'm pulling out the key events, the events and the situations I think readers really would profit from knowing more about, and that will make for a good, compelling story. And then, you know, at that point, I just basically, I write scene one, scene two, scene three. I tend to write in chunks I think of as scenes. I'm a very visual kind of thinker. And so I literally think of myself as being behind a camera, filming scenes whenever I can. I mean, there are periods, of course, where I'm pulling in expository material also, but for the most part, I construct my books as a series of visual scenes, which I think I think works well for readers and it works for me as a writer at any rate.
[SI] I liked what you said about the pros and cons of using oral history. Have the oral histories ever caused you to question or rethink an event that you thought you knew definitively, or did they ever lead you down a new, surprising path in your narratives?
[DJB] Yeah, both. My most recent book was, it's about the Japanese American experience during World War II. And I grew up on the West Coast. My father was in the flower business. I've always had many Japanese American friends. I felt that I pretty much knew the story of what happened to the Japanese Americans during that period of history. But when I got on the Densho website and started listening to and watching these oral histories that Tom Ikeda has, has recorded, I realized how much I did not know about that experience, how much only people who had lived through it really knew. And so, and so, those, those interviews were enormously eye-opening for me. And the story opened up a whole new understanding for me of what had happened. So that was certainly one instance. And then in terms of unexpected surprises, I think another example, so when I was writing The Boys in the Boat, Judy, Joe Rantz's daughter kept mentioning this guy named George Pocock who built the boats that boys raced in. And I kept wondering, why is she talking about the guy that built the boats? I don't care about the guy that built the boats. That's not my story. But then she kept bringing him up. So finally I did sort of a deep dive, and I went and met his son and talked to him, and it turned out he was this enormously important part of this story. So I would never have known that just by reading what was, what was in print already. It was only because Judy kept coming back to the importance of this guy and the effect that he had on the story that I, that I, and I went down it. And, and that's always fun, you know, as a writer of this, of the sort, it's wonderful when you, you dive into a project, and sometimes projects just sort of peter out. There isn't as much story there as you thought there would be there, particularly with The Boys in the Boat. It was a situation where new doors kept opening as I got to know Judy and talked to some of the other young men who'd rowed and their families. So it was a very rewarding experience in terms of just doors opening up that I, I didn't expect at all.
[SI] Your works often deal with the American West, either as a space itself or the people who hail from there. Are there themes that you see running through your works pertaining to the story of the West?
[DJB] Yeah, well, I'm certainly very much a product of the West. I've spent my whole life on the West Coast. I love Western landscapes. In fact, as a writer, I tend to write too much about landscape and my editors usually have to pare me back on that. So I like to write about sagebrush, very Western things. But more broadly, yeah, I mean, I'm drawn to the idea of the, the, the West as a, a land of opportunity, to the idea of the pioneering spirit, the idea of individuals confronting obstacles, particularly in outdoor settings, physical objects. So all those things are, are interesting to me. I'm also though interested in, like, at the same time, questioning some of those. So, you know, when you talk about Manifest Destiny, which we see at work, of course, in _Undaunted Courage_ and, and many other places, I, I I, I like to both appreciate that impulse, but also like critique it and, and explore the downsides of, of that zeal for conquering the West, you know, what the cost was to humans and to the land. And, and so I, I, so yeah, I would say that all those kinds of traditional Western themes interest me a lot.
[SI] What's your reading habits led in part to your writing career? What are you reading these days and what do you see yourself writing about in the future?
[DJB] So I continue to sort of read the same kind of thing that I write. I mean, I read recreationally also, I've actually just been reading the Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove series, which I had not read earlier in my life and enjoying that. But mostly what I read is narrative nonfiction and narrative history. So I just recently read David Grann's _Killers of the Flower Moon_ and also another book he wrote, _The Wager_, which is terrific. I like to read Hampton Sides. He recently wrote a book called _The Wide Wide Sea_ about Captain Cook's voyages. And then a book I particularly like another Seattle writer, Timothy Egan, who wrote a book called A Fever- _A Fever in the Heartland_ about the rise of the KKK. And, and I think that's just an astonishing astonishingly good book. So, except for sort of random reading and fiction, mostly what I read is the kind of thing that I aspire to write. In terms of what I might write in the future. I'm, I'm really not sure. I'm having a lot of trouble with my vision and I'm not sure I can undertake another big research project. So. If something comes along that really, really, really grabs me, I might not be able to resist. But, I don't have any plans right now to dive into another project.
[SI] Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and to present you with the award, and, you know, our Society is deeply grateful to you and your work, so thank you very much.
[DJB] Well, thank you so much, Shaun. And again, sorry I couldn't be there, but I appreciate it.