Skip to main content

David Herbert Donald

By


David Herbert Donald died yesterday.

Comments

  1. avrdsMay 19, 2009 at 6:06 PM

    Thanks, Robert.

    You and Chartres are much closer readers of the news than I am. I had totally missed it, and had read the book review information from the Times today.

    Here's the link:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/books/19donald.html

    As I posted down below, Fredrickson, in the little book on Lincoln I recently read (BIG ENOUGH TO BE INCONSISTENT) calls Donald and Cardwardine's biographies the two most notable recent biographies that manage to avoid "judging him from the standpoint of contemporary liberal or conservative ideologies" (this was published in 2008 so it was probably written before Burlingame's massive work).

    He writes that "the balance and relative objectivity that characterize these works have been rare in the scholarship about a president who has become a national icon."

    [Fredrickson provides an interesting historiographical overview of Lincoln studies/biographies, showing how, generally, we get the Lincoln we want and/or need.]

    ReplyDelete
  2. avrdsMay 19, 2009 at 7:10 PM

    Robert, I added a picture for you but see now that your headline already links to the Times obituary. You are way ahead of me when it comes to this internet stuff.....

    ReplyDelete
  3. James FergusonMay 20, 2009 at 12:48 PM

    I saw that Donald got his start by examining Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon.

    ReplyDelete
  4. avrdsMay 23, 2009 at 8:56 PM

    Here's a wonderful tribute, that was linked from the bibliophiles and battlefields site:

    http://hnn.us/articles/85629.html

    Makes me want to run out and get one of his books.

    ReplyDelete
  5. TripplerMay 24, 2009 at 6:31 AM

    Hi Folks!

    Good to see that the exchange of ideas re American history is being conducted in a much more relaxed manner here on this forum.

    So sad to read of the loss of the Professor Donald. He was a genius of a man who was remarkably articulate and knowledgeable about the Nation's past.


    ~~ known on another forum as Thanatopsy ~~

    ReplyDelete
  6. James FergusonMay 24, 2009 at 11:43 AM

    Great to have you aboard, Than. Drop me a line at Dzimas61@gmail.com and I can send you an invite to be a contributor.

    ReplyDelete
  7. avrdsMay 24, 2009 at 4:28 PM

    Welcome Tripp.

    History isn't dead. It isn't even past.

    Grab a copy of Goodwin and join in.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more