A series of shorter books, The Election of Andrew Jackson (1963),Andrew Jackson (1966), and Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (1967) led to his epic, multi-volume Life of Andrew Jackson: Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire (1977), Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom (1981), and Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy (1984), the last of which won the National Book Award. He had expected to write Van Buren's full biography until the more compelling figure of Andrew Jackson intervened. He also founded and headed the university's Institute for the Humanities.Ī popular educator, Remini was also a prolific author.
He taught first at Fordham University for a dozen years before moving to Chicago in 1965 to be chair of the history department at the newly created University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.
They had three children: Robert, Elizabeth, and Joan. In 1948, Remini married Ruth Kuhner, whom had met in kindergarten, and to whom he remained married until she died in 2012. It provided an analysis of sectional coalition-building from which the shadowy Van Buren emerged as the shrewd political operative behind the Jacksonian political movement. At the suggestion of Richard Hofstadter, he wrote his dissertation on Martin Van Buren, which became his first book, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959). He had been planning to go to law school, but during his three years in the navy during World War II he spent so much of his free time on ship reading history that he returned from service to study history in graduate school at Columbia, receiving his PhD in 1951. The effort led to his appointment as the historian of the House of Representatives, an unexpected turn after his long career teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago.īorn in New York City, Bob Remini graduated from Fordham University in 1943. To meet this request, Robert Remini was appointed distinguished visiting scholar of American history at the Library of Congress, where he spent the next three years writing The House (2006), a 200-year survey that drew in large part from his many biographies of political leaders.
The US House of Representatives had passed legislation-introduced by a former high school history teacher, Representative John Larson-to direct the Librarian of Congress to facilitate the writing of a privately funded narrative history of the House.
Political Biographer and Historian of the House of Representatives, 50 Year Member of the AHAĪt the age of 80, Robert Vincent Remini transformed from history professor to public historian.
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