David R. Chesnutt
David Rogers Chesnutt (1940 – December 15, 2014) was an American historian and editor. Life. Chesnutt was born in Athens, Alabama, and earned academic degrees at University of Alabama (1962), Auburn University (1967) and the University of Georgia (1973). Chesnutt was in the History Department at the University of South Carolina for 35 years as Research Professor. His major work was "The Papers of Henry Laurens", serving as Associate Editor and then Editor. As part of that project he was influential in moving the scholarly editing project to digital technologies, which was ground-breaking at the time. For  more than two decades Chesnutt served on the South Carolina Historical Records Advisory Board. He was an important figure in the foundation and early development of the Text Encoding Initiative and active in the Association for Computers and the Humanities. In 2005 Chesnutt was awarded the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina's "highest civilian honor for extraordinary lifetime achievement and service to the state and nation". Chesnutt died in Hardwick, Vermont, on December 15, 2014, of throat cancer.