Don Higginbotham (May 22, 1931 – June 22, 2008) was an American historian and Dowd Professor of History and Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A leading scholar of George Washington, he was a pioneering practitioner of the “new” military history and an expert on colonial and revolutionary America and the early national United States.

A native of Malden, Missouri, Higginbotham attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his A.B.

Higginbotham spent five years at the helm of UNC’s history department and served as president of the Southern Historical Association (1990–1991) and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (1992–1993).

He authored or edited many books, including Daniel Morgan, Revolutionary Rifleman (1961); The Atlas of the American Revolution (1974); The Papers of James Iredell (2 vols., 1976); Reconsiderations on the Revolutionary War (1978); George Washington and the American Military Tradition (1985); War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (1988); George Washington Reconsidered (2001); George Washington: Uniting a Nation (2002); and Revolution in America: Considerations and Comparisons (2005).