Academic

David Herbert Donald (1920-2009)

By Alfred Brophy

As I'm sitting here doing a little work on things antebellum, I see the sad news that David Herbert Donald has passed away.  Just so happens that his charming Lincoln is on the floor beside me.  Donald's volume was the first, I think, to make extensive use of the fabulous Lincoln Legal Papers.  At least it was one of the first; those papers have been mined well more recently by Mark Steiner.  

 Mr. Donald had retired by the time I entered graduate school, so I did not have the privilege of studying with him, but I have been his student in a more remote way: as a reader of his books.  I am a student of his ability to convey difficult ideas in elegant and understandable prose.  And one of the first biographies that I read when I got out of law school was the first volume of Donald's study of Charles Sumner (Charles Sumner and the Coming of Civil War).  Amazing how that volume, published in 1960, continues to repay historians' study--and how, despite nearly fifty years of intervening scholarship, it continues to bring insight and I would add joy.

Here is the New York Times obituary.  He was born in Mississippi in 1920, educated at Millsaps College and the University of Illinois, then went on to teaching positions at (among others) Columbia and Johns Hopkins, before moving to Harvard in 1973.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on May 19, 2009 (boomark / email).