David Herbert Donald: Difference between revisions

David Herbert Donald (b. 1920, Mississippi), took his PhD in 1945 under James G. Randall at the University of Illinois. He taught at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins and, from 1973, Harvard University. He also taught at Smith College, the University of North Wales, Princeton University, University College in London and served as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. At Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Harvard he trained dozens of graduate students including including Jean H. Baker, William J. Cooper, Jr., Michael Holt, Irwin Unger, and Ari Hoogenboom. He received two Pulitzer prizes, several honorary degrees, and in 1919 was elected president of the Southern Historical Association.

Currently David H. Donald is the Charles Warren Professor of American History (emeritus since 1991) at Harvard University. He has written over thirty books, including well received biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Wolfe and Charles Sumner. He specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, and in the history of the South.

He is best known for his biography of Abraham Lincoln, which has been praised by Eric Foner as the best biography of Lincoln, as well as his Pulitzer-Prize winning biographies of politician Charles Sumner and writer Thomas Wolfe, along with his revision of the Randall textbook, Civil War and Reconstruction (1961, 2001).

Donald's first book Lincoln's Herndon (1948) was a heavily researched and annotated, and skillfully written biography of William Herndon, the junior partner in Abraham Lincoln's law firm in Springfield, Illinois. Herndon was Lincoln's trusted aide until Lincoln became president and, in 1889 published a highly controversial biography of Lincoln based on numerous interviews. Donald concluded that Herndon, "stands, in the backward glance of history, as myth-maker and truth-teller." In his introduction, Carl Sandburg, the poet and Lincoln biographer, hailed Donald's book as the answer to scholars' prayers: “When is someone going to do the life of Bill Herndon. Isn't it about time? Now the question is out.” David Potter said Potter, whose own credentials as a Lincoln scholar gave his words authority, said Donald's biography of Charles Sumner portrayed, "Sumner as a man with acute psychological inadequacies” and exposed Sumner's "facade of pompous rectitude." Donald's evenhanded approach to Sumner, Potter concluded, was a model for biographers working with a difficult subject. "If it does not make Sumner attractive [the book] certainly makes him understandable."^[1]

Unlike the neoabolitionist historians who dominated the field after 1960, Donald is known for his political conservatism He has argued (like Randall) that the American Civil War was a needless war caused or hastened by the fanaticism of people like Charles Sumner. Like Randall he greatly admires Abraham Lincoln^[2].

• Lincoln's Herndon (1948)
• Divided We Fought: A Pictorial History of the War, 1861—1865 (1952)
• editor, Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase. (1954)
• Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (1961)(ISBN 0-394-70190-9)
• editor, Why the North Won the Civil War (1962) (ISBN 0-02-031660-7)
• Civil War and Reconstruction (1961; 2001) (ISBN 0-393-97427-8), 2001 edition with with Jean H. Baker & Michael F. Holt; 1961 edition with James G. Randall.
• Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960), prize-winning scholarly biography to 1860; Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970), biography from 1861.
• Politics of Reconstruction, 1863-—1867 (1965)
• Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1988) (ISBN 0-449-90286-2)
• Lincoln (1996)
• We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends (2003) (ISBN 0-7432-5468-6)

• Paul Goodman, "David Donald's Charles Sumner Reconsidered" in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3. (Sep., 1964), pp. 373-387. online at JSTOR
• Ari Hoogenboom, “David Herbert Donald: A Celebration, ” in A Master's Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald, ed. William J. Cooper, Jr., et al. (Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 1—15.
• Robert Allen Rutland, "David Herbert Donald," in Robert Allen Rutland, ed. Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000 U of Missouri Press. (2000) pp 35-48

• University of Illinois