Last night's Omaha World-Herald reported the death, at age 89, of Dr. James A. Rawley, professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I am deeply saddened by this news. I took a 400/800 Civil War seminar from Dr. Rawley in the second semester of my junior year at UNL; his own specialty was Civil War politics, and one of the requried books for the course was his own analysis of politics in bleeding Kansas between 1857 and 1860. He was an exceedingly kindly human being with a beautific smile, but a tough, tough instructor.
He bled red ink all over my term paper for that class, wherein I had explored whether Lincoln had maneuvered the South into firing the first shots of the Civil War, and whether it was a good or bad thing that he did so. I came to the conclusion that he didn't, but that the question was actually irrelevant anyway, and supported that notion with a great deal of deductive reasoning from the evidence I'd discovered in the source documents I'd used in my research.
Despite the red ink, Dr. Rawley gave me an A, and told me I was a born historian . . . doubtless the greatest compliment I've ever received in my life.
He was a treasure and an inspiration. He will be missed.
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