“When I started out, I wasn’t interested in Lincoln, and frankly found him a tiresome old fellow who was rather long-winded, told too many stories, was kind of a rough, frontier sort,” said Donald during his AP interview.

The Donalds had one son, Bruce Randall, a professor of computer science and biochemistry at Duke University. The David Herbert Donald Prize awards those for excellence in Lincoln studies - in 2005, Donald was the first recipient. To watch David Donald as he conjured up the Jacksonian era, what he called ‘the Age of Ambiguity,’ to hear him map out the road to disunion, to see him in action dominating the lecture hall or the seminar room, was intellectually inspirational - yet professionally intimidating.”ĭonald’s was so respected by Lincoln experts that an award was created in his name. “He was so dedicated, intelligent, and accomplished in his lecturing and his writing. “We, his students, knew we could never equal him,” recalled historian and writer Troy Gil ’88 in an article for the History News Network. Randall.ĭuring his long career, Donald wrote more than 30 books, two of which garnered Pulitzer Prizes: “Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War” and “Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe.” But he is best known for his work on Lincoln, and his admiration for the former president shone in his biography “Lincoln,” which is widely heralded as the best of all Lincoln biographies. There, he was research assistant to the great Lincoln scholar J.G. He briefly studied sociology and history at the University of North Carolina before eventually earning his M.A.

“He said, ‘You forgot your hat.’ And I said, ‘I don’t wear a hat.’ And he said, ‘You teach in my school, you’ll wear a hat.’ So I didn’t take the job.” “The man who interviewed me told me I could have the job and I went to gather whatever I had and started to follow him out of his office,” Donald recalled during a 2005 interview with the Associated Press (AP). After graduating, Donald hitchhiked north to Indianola, Miss., where he interviewed for the job of high school band teacher, a position funded by sales from a Coca-Cola machine. In his early years, Donald thought of himself as a musician rather than a historian. Donald, a leading historian of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, was born in 1920 in Goodman, Miss., then a segregated town, to Ira Unger Donald and Sue Ella Donald, a cotton planter and former schoolteacher, respectively. David Herbert Donald, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of American Civilization Emeritus, died Sunday (May 17) of heart failure at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Abraham lincoln david herbert donald