Raymond W. Smock is a historian, editor, and biographer who served as the first official historian of the U. S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 1995. Currently he is the director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, which sits on the banks of the Potomac River about 70 miles from Washington, DC. His latest book is Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (2009).With Louis Harlan, he co-edited the fourteen-volume Booker T. Washington Papers. Smock has had careers in academia, in business, as president of Instructional Resources Corporation, and in government service, as the historian of the U. S. House of Representatives. He was senior historical consultant to the twenty-six part public television series A Biography of America and historical consultant to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. He is a graduate of Roosevelt University in Chicago and earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Maryland in College Park. He resides in Martinsburg, WV with his wife Phyllis.