Looks like Denny did something right. From the National Coalition for History
On 28 April 2005, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) filled the decade vacant post of “Historian of the House of Representatives” and announced the appointment of University of Illinois at Chicago historian Robert V.
Remini to serve in that position. In making the announcement, Hastert stated that Professor Remini’s “commitment to documenting the American experience will serve our great institution and the American people well.”Remini holds positions as Professor of History Emeritus and a Professor of Research Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and serves as University Historian. He is also the Distinguished Visiting Scholar in American History at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, where, since 1999, he has been working on his Congressionally ordered (P.L.
106-99) tome — a history of the House of Representatives. Remini is currently revising and polishing his 600-page draft that is expected to be published in the spring of 2006.The appointment did not come as a surprise to many Hill insiders. As reported in the NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE some months back (see “After Nearly a Decade, House to Fill Historian Position” in NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE, Vol 10, #6; 13 February 2004), for years the Clerk of the House, Jeff Trandahl, has been building a professionally staffed History and Preservation Office to meet the needs of House members. He wanted to fill the vacant position through a nationwide search.
Likewise, historians had been quietly working to see that the position was modeled after the Senate Historian Richard Baker’s in terms of duties, responsibilities, and term of office (Baker, as a career historian has been in his position since 1975 and has served twelve different Majority Leaders). However, it did not turn out that way — Remini’s position is a “term” appointment, made by the Speaker, and therefore, in theory, is a partisan appointment. Unlike Baker, Remini, for example, could be replaced should the Republicans lose control of the House. At that time, a new Majority Leader could either re-appoint the current historian or select another individual. Remini, however, is devoted to keeping the position strictly non-partisan; he plans a courtesy visit to Democratic leaders in the near future. He told the NCH, “As long as I am historian, it will be non-partisan, just like Richard Baker’s Senate office.”
Inside sources report that Speaker Hastert originally wanted the historian position to be merely “honorific” — modeled roughly after the Library of Congress Poet Laureate position. Hastert also apparently was not impressed with the candidates advanced by the Clerk’s office. He wanted the first House historian in over a decade to be a person of stature within the historical community and Remini clearly filled the bill. According to Remini, “I was never a candidate…all of a sudden, out of the blue they asked me to do it.”
Exactly what the relationship will be between the House Clerk’s Office of History and Preservation and Remini’s has yet to be entirely ironed out.
After his appointment was announced, Remini immediately laid out an ambitious agenda for his new office that complements (not duplicates) the services that the Clerk’s Office of History and Preservation provides. His office will gather oral histories from current and former members, start a lecture series for freshman members, and, somewhat like the Clerk’s operation, provide reference services for members. With upcoming opening of the Capitol Visitor Center, his office will play an important role in developing exhibits and telling the story of the capitol to the visiting public. The new House historian’s goal is to see that history is not only recorded “but that it serves as a tool for the lower chamber.” Remini already has one assistant in place and expects to hire additional staff in the future.Remini received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1951 and taught at a variety of distinguished schools. His extensive experiences include Columbia University, Fordham University, the University of Notre Dame, and Jilin University of Technology in the People’s Republic of China. Remini published over twenty books that include topics such as Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams. He recently won the Freedom Award from the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.
Did it really take Hastert this long to find someone who didn’t deny the holocaust?
Excerpted from NEW YORK TIMES NEWS Jan 10, 1995
GINGRICH FIRES NEWLY APPOINTED HOUSE HISTORIAN
By STEPHEN LABATON
WASHINGTON – Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday night dismissed
the historian of the House of Representatives … after learning
that she had once helped to deny federal financing of an
educational program about the Holocaust on the ground that it did
not present the views of the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
Gingrich made the announcement on Monday evening after he
learned of the evaluation by Christina Jeffrey, which had
outraged many Jewish groups when it became public in 1988. He
acted on Monday evening after House Democrats called upon him to
dismiss her….
On Monday afternoon, as Democrats learned of her past, they
sharply criticized the appointment. “It’s just appalling,”
said Rep. Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts. “He ought to
get rid of her. This is outrageous.” Professor Jeffrey … was
an associate professor at Kennesaw State College in Marietta,
Ga. She teaches public administration and American government.
At the time she evaluated the Holocaust program in 1986, her
name was Christina Price. “It wasn’t the kind of thing I would
have said if I had known it was going to be in The New York
Times,” she said earlier in the day on Capitol Hill. “It has
never been my position that you ought to be going out and finding
the KKK and bringing them into middle-school classrooms.”
Professor Jeffrey’s evaluation of the
“Facing History and
Ourselves” project for the Education Department appeared in a
record of a 1988 congressional subcommittee hearing. She wrote:
“The program gives no evidence of balance or objectivity. The
Nazi point of view, however unpopular, is still a point of view
and is not presented, nor is that of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“The selection of only two problem areas, Germany and Armenia,
leaves out many of which are more recent. I’m thinking of the
U.S.S.R., Afghanistan, Cambodia and Ethiopia, among others. My
impression is that the program, based as it is on the resource
book `The Holocaust and Human Behavior,’ may be appropriate for a
limited religious audience but not for wider distribution.”
The program, Facing History and Ourselves, is a training
program for high school teachers and their students and is about
morality and society and the citizen’s role in preventing
tyranny. It included an examination of the genocide of Jews and
Armenians in this century.
About the program, she wrote: “It is a paradoxical and
strange aspect of this program and the methods used to change the
thinking of students is the same that Hitler and Goebbels used to
propagandize the German people. This re-education method was
perfected by Chairman Mao and now is being foisted on American
children under the guise of `understanding history.”’
An initial review of the educational program in the early
1980s called it “exemplary,” and Holocaust scholars said on
Monday that it is not ideological or religious, but teaches
students about how ordinary citizens can get swept up into
tyrannical and genocidal movements.
“It tries to teach about evil in the 20th century, looking at
genocide and the dehumanization of people in various places
around the world,” said Prof. Sol Gittleman, the provost and a
scholar of German studies at Tufts University, and a member of
the board of the “Facing History” program.
At various points during the 1980s the program was denied
funding, although it had been accredited by the Education
Department and is now widely taught. It was heavily criticized by
conservative critic Phyllis Schlafly, who asked the Education
Department to reject the grant application and accused the
program of “psychological manipulation, induced behavioral
change and privacy-invading treatment.”
Professor Jeffrey said she was chosen for the evaluation
because “they assumed I would oppose that, because I was at Troy
(State University in Alabama) which had a conservative
reputation. I didn’t know anything about the Holocaust.”
Jewish groups and scholars of the Holocaust on Monday praised
the program and denounced Professor Jeffrey’s evaluation.
“Calling for equal time to present Hitler’s point of view is
outrageous and bizarre,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and
founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “To come
out against the program on the ground that the Nazis were not
given their due, if we used that standard on all educational
grants, we’d probably have to cut out all grants.”
The program, which is accredited by the Education Department,
receives private and public financing and is widely taught in
high schools.
Oh good grief! Might one assume “Recent History” to be someone who has never been interviewed by a newspaper and/or never reads newspapers? RH’s post, “Did it really take Hastert this long to find someone who didn’t deny the holocaust?” reflects a thoroughly discredited view of the Past Historian. But what’s wrong with me, ha ha, of course, it’s a joke.
But it really is a bad joke. To find Holocaust Deniers, one has to find anti-Semites–they exist and their hatred is not funny. It is also not funny to attribute their particular brand of hatred to an innocent party. A sincere apology will be gracefully accepted.