David Herbert Donald has devoted a distinguished career to the study of nineteenth-century America. Both a superior teacher and an influential scholar, Donald ranks as one of America's leading authorities on the Civil War era.

Donald was born on a plantation in rural Goodman, Mississippi. The family of his father, Ira Unger Donald, had lived in the South for 300 years. His mother, Sue Ella Belford Donald, however, was the daughter of John Belford, a Vermont cavalry officer during the Civil War, who had moved to Mississippi during Reconstruction to operate a school for freedmen. Donald attended Holmes County Agricultural High School, Holmes County Junior College, and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. degree in history from Millsaps College in 1941. Growing up in Mississippi shaped Donald's attitudes and outlook. From an early age he was, by his own admission, sensitive to what would later become a central...