Thereafter, he completed both bachelor"s and master"s degrees in history from Mississippi State University in Starkville. He taught at the junior college level during the 1950s and in 1964 completed his Doctor of Philosophy from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.His dissertation is entitled Party Politics in Mississippi, 1850-1860.
Foreign twenty years, the Mississippi native Rawson was a faculty member at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Foreign another four years, he was the Dean of the Graduate School. Donald and Denver were two of eight children of Richard Willis Rawson (1893-1967) and the former Bessie Mae Sanders (1901-1997).
After high school, Rawson entered the United States Army and served from 1943 to 1946 in both the European and Pacific theaters.
Rawson was the NSU history department chairman from 1972 until 1980, when then president Rene Bienvenu named him Dean of the Graduate School, with Marietta LeBreton taking over as history chairman. This was Rawson"s final position until retirement at the age of fifty-nine in the summer of 1984.
He was a board member and president of both the Louisiana Historical Association and the North Louisiana Historical Association, which publish, respectively the journals, Louisiana History and North Louisiana History.
Rawson was an authority on middle-period American history, with emphasis on the United States. South, and authored numerous articles for scholarly and professional journals, such as "Democratic Resurgence in Mississippi, 1852-1853" in the Journal of Mississippi History.He wrote about the Natchitoches Parish naturalist Caroline Dormon.Rawson was a member of the Southern Historical Association, the Mississippi Historical Association, and the Southern Studies Institute, which is based at NSU.
