David M. Potter

rdf:langString David M. Potter

rdf:langString David Morris Potter (December 6, 1910 – February 18, 1971) was an American historian specializing in the study of the American South and the American Civil War. He was born in Augusta, Georgia, graduated from the Academy of Richmond County, and in 1932 graduated from Emory University. Potter entered graduate school at Yale the same year but left four years later without finishing his dissertation. He taught at the University of Mississippi for two years, then at Rice University for another two before completing his dissertation in 1940 under Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. In 1942 Yale published his dissertation as Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis and hired him as an assistant professor. As professor of history at Yale University in 1942–1961 and Coe Professor of American History at Stanford University in 1961–1971 he directed numerous dissertations and served on numerous editorial and professional boards. He also held the Walgreen Lectureship at the University of Chicago, and the Commonwealth Fund Lectureship at the University of London. Potter held the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in 1947. He was a pioneer in sponsoring the study of Women's history. Potter was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He posthumously won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (1976), an in-depth narrative and analysis of the causes of the American Civil War. His main achievement was to put the history of the South in national perspective. He rejected the conflict model of Charles A. Beard and emphasized the depth of consensus on American values. He considered himself a conservative and was a prominent exponent of Consensus history. Potter died of cancer at age 60. The New York Times obituary quoted an encomium of historian Martin Duberman: "David Potter may be the greatest living historian in the United States. To read him is to become aware of a truth that only the greatest historians have been able to show us: That the chief lesson to be derived from a study of the past is that it holds no simple lesson, and that the historian's main responsibility is to prevent anyone from claiming that it does."