Donald R. Shaffer received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park. Since then, Dr. Shaffer has served as a faculty member at a number of different institutions of higher education in the United States. Although a specialist in the 19th-century U.S., especially the Civil War, he has taught a wide variety of courses in American and World History.
Besides teaching, Dr. Shaffer is an active scholar. In addition to numerous conference papers, book reviews, and journal articles, he is the author of After the Glory - The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (University Press of Kansas, 2004). This book won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. He also has published more recently, with Elizabeth Regosin, Voices of Emancipation - Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files (NYU Press, 2008).
A resident of Arizona, Dr. Shaffer enjoys in his spare time gardening and fishing, and the company of his wife and two small children.