Mankato, MN - Paul Burns was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on Groundhog Day in 1939 to Ollie and Callie Burns, his kind and devoted parents. His father worked as a long-distance truck driver and his mother worked in a playing card factory.

Paul was an excellent student and loved baseball. One of his favorite memories was when his little league baseball team won the Ohio State Championship in 1950. He called that moment the apex of his athletic career, which he joked had gone downhill ever since.

The first in his family to attend college, Paul was given an academic scholarship to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He began college wanting to be a high school history teacher, but by the end of his freshman year, he decided to become a Russian historian.

He was a University Fellow his senior year, graduating with honors in history. An Honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow with an NDEA Title IV Fellowship at Indiana University, he received his M.A., Russian Studies Certificate, and Ph.D. in Russian History.

In 1963, Paul accepted what he thought would be a two-year position at the Southern Regional Division of the University of Nevada. Instead, he remained for 33 years, helping guide its transformation into the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which now has more than 30,000 students.

As a teacher, he urged students to approach Russia with an open mind and empathy, instead of just learning about "the enemy." He developed courses in Russian Culture and Russian Film, taught the first Honors class, and offered courses on contemporary issues such as Gorbachev's reforms and Solzhenitsyn.

At the same time, he played a major role in shaping the developing university, chairing the Department of History for eight years, twice chairing the University Senate, and leading a campus-wide committee to restructure academic colleges.

In Las Vegas, he met and married his first wife, Juliet Jones, an elementary school teacher. They had two daughters: Heather Skyler, a novelist and communications director at the University of Georgia, and Jennifer Stillman, a Ph.D. in politics and education who has worked at several education think tanks and currently teaches high school government and history in Virginia.

In his last decade at UNLV, he was Executive Assistant to the Provost, also serving as Faculty Athletics Representative. An avid advocate for the arts, he was President of the Allied Arts Council, chaired the State Arts and Nevada State Museums and History.

He retired to Southern Minnesota after marrying his second wife, Loretta, a historian and professor of European History at Mankato State University. They met one summer at the annual reading of Advanced Placement essays by high school students. In Mankato, he continued to teach part-time and work as a leader at the AP readings each summer. His last reading - his 25th - was in 2014.

Paul is survived by his wife, Loretta, and his two daughters.