David Edwin Harrell


David Edwin Harrell Jr. is an American historian who is best known for his scholarship of Religion in the United States. He is a Professor Emeritus at Auburn University, where he served as the Breeden Eminent Scholar of Southern History and retired in 2006. He has written biographies of Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, and Homer Hailey, as well as other works about Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement. In 2006, he published Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People, a college textbook that discusses the effects of religion in the history of the United States.
Harrell was born in Jacksonville, Florida to parents David Edwin and Mildred Lee Harrel. He attended David Lipscomb College as an undergraduate, and Vanderbilt University as a graduate student. He received a Ph.D. in 1962.