Don E. Fehrenbacher; Pulitzer-Winning Historian at Stanford

Don E. Fehrenbacher, a Stanford University history professor who won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for his study of the Dred Scott case, has died. He was 77.

Fehrenbacher died Saturday after suffering heart failure at his home on the Stanford campus.

An expert in 19th century U.S. history, he taught at the university from 1953 to 1984 and served as a visiting professor at several other universities.

Fehrenbacher won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his book “The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics.”

Before that publication, he completed the late Stanford professor David M. Potter’s posthumous book, “The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861,” for which Potter won the 1977 Pulitzer.

Fehrenbacher later said that Potter’s draft, as he found it, required “some measure of compression, rearrangement and revision, amounting at times to uninvited collaboration.”

Fehrenbacher also was awarded the 1997 Lincoln Prize, the nation’s highest annual award for Civil War studies.

The historian spent years studying Lincoln and published “Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s” in 1962. Several years and books later, he and his wife spent 12 years compiling the “Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln,” a collection published in 1996 of 1,900 quotations attributed to the president.

Fehrenbacher also studied and wrote about California history, notably in “California, an Illustrated History,” written with N.E. Tutorow in 1968.

“The Californians are the story,” a Times reviewer wrote in praise, “and the authors faithfully delineate their activities, bringing the reader right up to the present.”

Fehrenbacher, a native of Sterling, Ill., is survived by his wife, Virginia Ellen Swaney Fehrenbacher, their three children and eight grandchildren.