Don Davis earned his bachelor's degree from San Francisco State University. He attended graduate school at Indiana University, where he obtained his MA and PhD, focusing on Russian history. Davis wrote his dissertation on Vladimir Lenin and theories of warfare, especially those of Clausewitz. Davis edited, No East or West: The Memoirs of Paul B. Anderson. He co-authored The First Cold War: The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in U.S. - Soviet Relations with Eugene P.

Trani, an American diplomatic historian. Additionally, they published Distorted Mirrors, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, and A Bridge to Somewhere. In 2004, Davis retired from Illinois State University after forty years of teaching courses in European, Russian, and Soviet history. He was one of the university's longest-serving faculty members in the history department. He is a member of the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (AASEEES) and has published in its journal, the Slavic Review ("The American YMCA and the Russian Revolution" vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 469-91) as well as in many other scholarly journals and anthologies.

His personal archive, the "Davis Collection," is at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Davis is married to Mary Davis, a retired elementary school teacher and director of SHOW BUS, a multi-county rural transport system. They have a son and a daughter.