In many ways, Philip Shaw Paludan lived his life like Abraham Lincoln, a man he studied for years as a history professor, 30 of those at Kansas University.

Paludan, 69, died Wednesday at his home in Springfield, Ill., but his legacy, like Lincoln’s, will live on through the lives of students, colleagues and family he touched.

He was known as a tough professor at KU, one who didn’t have many students. The ones he did have, however, responded well, said Ted Wilson, history department associate chairman. Paludan was inspired by one of his history professors as an undergraduate at Occidental College in California, Wilson said. That professor served as his mentor.

“Phil had great expectations of himself and of his students,” Wilson said. “He was demanding, he was enormously committed and interested in what history could be, what history could show us, and he wanted students to understand that, and many students responded.”

The only graduate student he ever had, Brian Dirk, now teaches American history at Anderson University in Indiana, and recently wrote a book about Lincoln titled “Lincoln the Lawyer.”

On his blog he wrote a brief tribute to his former professor.

“Through my years of study there Phil was a confidant, a guide and a true mentor, in every sense of the world,” he wrote. “Nothing I could have accomplished as a teacher or writer would have been possible without him.”

In his home life, Paludan’s two daughters, Karin Sorey, 38, McLean, Va., and Kirsten Paludan, 35, Kansas City, Mo., said their father was instrumental in their careers as singers. He supported them both emotionally and financially, and it made him happy to see them fulfill their dreams.

Sorey said she recently asked her father, an intellectual and world traveler, in what place he was the happiest.

“He said, ‘if I am really honest, the place that makes me the happiest is the classroom,'” she said. “The thing that made him the happiest was teaching. It made him happy to share history, new ideas about Lincoln,” she said in her father’s home library, which is filled with books about Lincoln.

She said she sat in on one of his classes and observed that her father expected the best from his students, but in turn, he would give them his best.

She said what attracted Paludan to Lincoln was that the American president was “always striving to understand people he didn’t necessarily agree with.”

Sorey said her father gave his children an open mind to try and “reach across chasms and understand people you didn’t share common threads with.”

“My dad taught me that you shouldn’t just surround yourself with the people who agree with you,” Kirsten Paludan said. “It’s important to have people around you who will pose questions.”

Having had an open relationship in which they could ask their dad questions about himself and life gives them peace with his death.

Paludan’s wife, Marty, said her husband, whom she met at KU in 1984 and married in 1990, taught her how to be gentle and look at situations from every angle.

Her son, Cody Hammond, who lives in New York City, said his mother’s relationship with Paludan was one of true friendship.

“He truly made my mother happy,” Hammond said. “That was one of the things that I think in a marriage is really great when your spouse can truly make you happy. That was a reality.”

“He was not a person who retired into the woodwork, so to speak,” Wilson said. “Anybody who is going to be in a university for 30 to 35 years, one wants to make certain or believe that person is going to be known. Certainly Phil Paludan was a person who was known.”