David Herbert Donald
David Herbert Donald was one of the enormously influential group of American historians who, after World War II, re-envisioned major segments of the American past. They put a new face on political ideas and party behavior (Richard Hofstadter), the post-Civil War South and Jim Crow (C. Vann Woodward), immigration and ethnicity (Oscar Handlin), culture and society (Daniel Boorstin), Colonial intellectual history (Bernard Bailyn), and African-Americans and racism (John Hope Franklin), American law (J. Willard Hurst), and business (Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.). In doing so, they made their discipline, for a season, a significant intellectual force in the wider culture.
One of David Donald’s signal contributions to this enterprise was to bring an unmatched psychological understanding to the lives of major figures in the American past: Charles Sumner, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Wolfe. And although he was a white Southerner, a Mississippian, whose family came to America in the 1630s, he retold, with elegance, eloquence, and understanding the antislavery/Union side of the great American saga of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In this he shared with John Hope Franklin (who died less than two months before him) the distinction of freeing the Civil War-Reconstruction period from the fetters of region and race by which it had so long been bound.