Since James A. Rawley did not begin his career in American history by studying race, I was interested in finding out about his earlier work and what led to his interest in understanding the history of race relations and eventually to the establishment of a prize for the best book in that field. Jim Rawley has been a member of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and OAH for close to sixty years and has attended almost every annual meeting in the last half-century. He and his wife Ann flew to the West Coast in March to attend the 98^th annual meeting in San José . They are a regular fixture at the Distinguished Members Reception as well as the Annual Awards Ceremony where they personally congratulate the newest Rawley Prize winner(s).

Shortly before we left for San José , I had an opportunity to interview Jim about his education, his career, and his involvement with OAH. Jim’s Hoosier roots go back nearly nine decades to his birthplace in Terre Haute , Indiana . After earning his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree at the University of Michigan, he moved to New York and began his doctoral work at Columbia University under Allan Nevins, before World War II interrupted his graduate training. Rawley had been drafted before the U.S. entered the war but was classified 4-F; after Pearl Harbor he was called up again and this time “was declared to be 1-A.” All of his Army service was stateside (“I think probably the War Department wanted to win the war,” he noted) from Texas, where he got his basic training, to North Carolina where he was commissioned, to Cape Cod where he served in antiaircraft artillery and the transportation corps. He ended up at the New York Port of Embarkation, where, after the war ended, he was assigned to help write that installation’s history.

With the war’s close, returning G.I.s swarmed the New York University campus. There was a great need for faculty so Rawley got himself discharged and started teaching history at NYU. At the same time he returned to his graduate work at Columbia where Nevins suggested that he write his dissertation on the life of Edwin D. Morgan. Morgan was the Civil War governor of New York and a U.S. senator and his papers had just been deposited in the New York State Library in Albany . While he was researching the newly opened Morgan files, Rawley ran across the wife of a Morgan descendant in The New York Times and looked her up. The New York socialite invited Rawley out to Wheatley, her mansion on Long Island , where she showed him a “whole trunk full of Morgan manuscripts. She said ‘the children don’t want these. What will I do with them?’” Overjoyed with this surprise treasure, Rawley replied that if she let him use them, he would then deposit them with the rest of the Morgan Papers in Albany. Having the first crack at the Morgan Papers, Rawley wrote his dissertation which was then published by Columbia University Press.

Rawley went on to teach at Hunter College and Sweet Briar College before landing at his permanent academic home, the University of Nebraska, in 1964. Once in Lincoln, he taught and wrote and became involved in the work of the Nebraska State Historical Society, where he served on the executive board and as president. Lincoln was also the home of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and Rawley became its resident agent, an officer that OAH, as a Nebraska nonprofit incorporated association, is required to have. He continues to serve in this position today.

I asked Professor Rawley how he came to be interested in race as a subject of historical inquiry. He replied that in the 1960s J.B. Lippincott Company “was doing a series of books, and I was asked to do a book on Bleeding Kansas, so I thought, well, this is going to be pretty much a political story, political parties, elections and so on.” Then as he got into the material it became very clear to him just how powerful a role race played in the events of the 1850s. When the book appeared in 1969, it was entitled, Race and Politics: Bleeding Kansas and the Coming of the Civil War. In his teaching, Rawley began to focus more on race, offering upper division courses on race relations. He then became interested in the relations between English and U.S. abolitionists, when an English economic historian asked him to write a book on the transatlantic slave trade. In 1981 Norton published his The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. Since then, he has also published works on secession and the Civil War. His ten scholarly books “have stood the test of time,” according to Kenneth J. Winkle, University of Nebraska history department chair, “and most have achieved the status of classics in their fields.”

Although Professor Rawley has been retired for eighteen years, you will still find him on most days in his office in Oldfather Hall on the Nebraska campus. He has completed a revision of his Transatlantic Slave Trade that the University of Nebraska Press will publish later this year. He is also working on a chapter for a book on Stephen A. Douglas that emerged from an anniversary commemoration of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Professor Rawley continues his work for OAH and is serving on the 2006 Midwestern Regional Conference Committee. That conference, scheduled for July 6-8, 2006, will take place in Lincoln.

Professor Rawley’s continued work as an American historian and his support of his professional organization through the Rawley Prize and other contributions is an inspiration to many of us. He is a reminder that one’s connection with one’s professional organization is as important as the ties with his university, college, or other place of employment. His work demonstrates just how important OAH is in his career and I suspect we would find that is true for most of our nine thousand members.