Raymond Smock Papers Collection

The Raymond W. Smock Papers contain the personal correspondence, files, government reports, and photographs of the first official historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, in a career as a public historian covering more than sixty years. Smock kept an extensive journal, from 1985 to 1995, of his activities as the historian of the House of Representatives, working under the leadership of three House Speakers, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr. of Massachusetts, Jim Wright of Texas, and Tom Foley, of Washington State.

From left to right: Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd, Ray Smock, Speaker Jim Wright, 1989.

Collection Overview: 

Biographical Information:

This collection was acquired in June 2025, and is currently being processed.

Raymond Smock was an activist in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and of the Anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He taught courses in African American History at the Pentagon in 1972.

Smock was a national planner of the bicentennials of the U.S. Constitution, the three branches of the Federal Government, and the Bill of Rights. He represented the Speaker and the Commission on the Bicentenary of the House of Representatives as staff for the Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution, appointed by President Ronal Reagan and headed by former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. He was also the Speaker’s representative on the Pentagon’s 50th Anniversary of World War II Committee.

Smock’s earlier career included co-editing the 14 volume Booker T. Washington Papers at the University of Maryland, the first major documentary publication to focus on the career of an African American leader. Smock served as president of three organizations, The Association for Documentary Editing, the Society for History in the Federal Government, and the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress, founded at the Byrd Center in 2003.

​Smock was fired as Historian of the House by incoming Speaker Newt Gingrich, during the first transition of power from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in forty years, following the congressional elections of 1994. Smocks papers contain extensive files on that transition and the rise of Gingrich’s leadership and his eventual decline.

The papers include the successful effort to restore independent status to the National Archives in 1984, and earlier efforts to protect the integrity of the holdings of the National Archives from arbitrary decisions of the General Services Administration (GSA).

From 1995 to 2002 Smock was a freelance writer and public historian who was senior historical consultant to a 26-part public television series “A Biography of America,” and consultant on the exhibits of the new National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the first museum dedicated to the story of the U.S. Constitution. In 1998, he began working with Senator Robert C. Byrd and his staff on the creation of the Robert C. Byrd Center at Shepherd University (then Shepherd College) and was selected by Senator Byrd to be the first director of the Center. Smock served as director for the next twenty-two years, and upon his retirement he was named Director Emeritus.