David Herbert Donald

David Herbert Donald (1920 - 2009) was a distinguished historian, longtime chair of the graduate program in American history at Harvard, and a leading authority on the Civil War era and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Donald's Lincoln studies began at the University of Illinois, where he was a graduate assistant to Professor James Randall. Donald assisted Randall in preparing a four-volume Lincoln biography that served as the definitive portrait of the 16th president until Donald's own work in the 1990s. Donald's first book, published in 1948, was a study of Lincoln's controversial law partner, William Herndon. In the 1950s, Donald emerged as a leading authority on the Civil War era. After teaching at Columbia and Princeton, he held an endowed chair at Harvard University, where he headed the graduate program in American history. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his biographies of the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner and the 20th century Southern novelist Thomas Wolfe. In 1995, he published his crowning accomplishment, Lincoln, an intimate biography of the president who saved the Union. In Donald's gripping, novelistic account, Lincoln emerges from the mists of legend, as a living, breathing human being -- complex, subtle, and burning with ambition. The Lincoln revealed in Donald's pages is a far more human but no less admirable figure than readers had met before. The book won universal acclaim and has become the Lincoln biography against which all others are measured. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1997 Summit in Baltimore, Maryland, Professor Donald discusses the rewards of historical research, with examples from his studies of President Lincoln.