Robert Vincent Remini (July 17, 1921 – March 28, 2013) was an American historian and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He wrote numerous books about President Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian era, most notably a three-volume biography of Jackson. For the third volume of Andrew Jackson, subtitled The Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845, he won the 1984 U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction."National Book Awards – 1984". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 24, 2012. Remini was widely praised for his meticulous research on Jackson and thorough knowledge of him. His books portrayed Jackson in a mostly favorable light and he was sometimes criticized for being too partial towards his subject.
Remini also wrote biographies of other early 19th century Americans, namely Martin Van Buren, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and Joseph Smith. He served as Historian of the United States House of Representatives from 2005 until 2010 and wrote a history of the House, which was published in 2006.
Life Robert Vincent Remini was born on July 17, 1921, in New York City. His parents were William Remini and Loretta Tiernay Remini, and he was the elder brother of William and Vincent Remini. His father worked as a credit manager for a coal company. Remini recalled that his original plan in life was to become a lawyer. He explained that this was "not because [he] was intrigued by the law, but because it seemed like a worthy profession then for a child of the Great Depression." Remini received his B.S. from Fordham University in 1943. He then enlisted in the United States Navy and was involved in anti-submarine warfare during World War II. His reading of history while in the Navy caused him to want to be a historian. "I remember we docked at Boston and I went to the library and took out all nine volumes of Henry Adams' history of the U.S. under Jefferson and Madison," he told the Chicago Tribune. "I loved it. Right then I realized that by God, it was history I loved, not law." "When I told my parents, they were shocked," Remini recalled. "'Oh!' they said. 'You will starve.'" Remini married Ruth T. Kuhner, whom he had met in kindergarten, in 1948 and they had three children: Elizabeth Nielson, Joan Costello, and Robert W. Remini.
Remini received his M.A. from Columbia University in 1947 and his PhD from Columbia in 1951. At Columbia, he studied under historian Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter suggested that he write his dissertation on Martin Van Buren. The dissertation eventually turned into his first book, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959). The book examines Van Buren's role in building a cross-sectional coalition which formed the foundation for the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the eventual creation of the Democratic Party. Remini was named an assistant professor of history at Fordham in 1951 and remained there until 1965. Historian Richard K. McMaster, who graduated from Fordham University in 1962, wrote in 2009 that Remini was great at "making American history an interesting story." McMaster said, "I remember him as a remarkably kind man, genuinely interested in his students and encouraging of our efforts at research. He had the uncanny ability to present the Age of Jackson with such immediacy that you might think he'd had lunch in the Ramskeller with Martin Van Buren. He is an American treasure."
In 1965, Remini joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago, then known as the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC). He was the school's first chairman of the History Department, serving in that role from 1965 until 1971. Remini later founded the UIC Institute for the Humanities, which he chaired from 1981 to 1987. Remini retired in 1991. During his career, he served as a visiting professor at the Jilan University of Technology in China, the University of Richmond, the University of Notre Dame, and Wofford College. When writing history, Remini employed self-discipline to try to better himself. "I was trained by Jesuits, and you were rewarded if you did good and punished if you did bad," he said. "I decided that I had to write nine pages a day. And if I did, I got a martini. If not, I didn't."
The House of Representatives passed a measure introduced by Representative John B. Larson, a former high school history teacher, directing the Librarian of Congress to facilitate the writing of a history of the House of Representatives. Remini was then asked by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington to write a Congressional history, The House: The History of the House of Representatives. Remini accepted the task and the book was published in 2006. The book was considered to be "nonpartisan, readable, and stocked with memorable characters." The work led to his appointment as Historian of the United States House of Representatives by Speaker Dennis Hastert on April 28, 2005. He was 83 at the time of his appointment. As House Historian, Remini was credited for his non-partisanship, especially after previous House Historians had been fired over partisan issues. He enjoyed visiting the Library of Congress as House Historian. "He was like a kid in a candy shop," said his daughter, Joan Costello. "He was so tickled and thrilled to be able to read the rare books, documents and letters available to only a few." He retired in 2010 and was succeeded by Matthew Wasniewski.
Remini's wife died in May 2012 at the age of 90. Remini died the following year at Evanston Hospital in Evanston, Illinois on March 28, 2013, after a stroke. He was 91.
Publications Andrew Jackson Remini is best known for his work on America's seventh president Andrew Jackson. After his book on Van Buren, he initially planned on writing a full biography of him until deciding to write about Jackson instead. In the 1960s, Remini wrote a series of short books about Jackson, which were The Election of Andrew Jackson (1963), Andrew Jackson (1966), and Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (1967).
Remini's initial books on Andrew Jackson convinced him to write a fuller account of the man's life. This led to the writing of his book Andrew Jackson, published in three volumes (1977, 1981, 1984), which is considered his magnum opus. It was originally conceived as a single volume, but Remini tried to convince his editor, Hugh Van Dusen, to allow for two. He at first refused, saying, "I can't sell two volumes." Remini recalled, "We were sitting there in the middle of The Marriage of Figaro and he turned to me and he said, 'You can have two volumes,' and that was the beginning of it. Then, when the presidential years grew to be more than another volume, I needed a third volume. I took him to see Tristan und Isolde — and it worked!" The finished series totaled approximately 1,600 pages. "There was an electrifying dynamism about Jackson that I found irresistible," Remini said. He went on to call him "the embodiment of the new American." He added, "This new man was no longer British. He no longer wore the queue and silk pants. He wore trousers, and he had stopped speaking with a British accent."
Remini took a moderate view of Jackson's behavior during the Bank War. He stated in an interview that he believed that the Second Bank of the United States had "too much power, which it was obviously using in politics. It had too much money which it was using to corrupt individuals. And so Jackson felt he had to get rid of it. It is a pity because we do need a national bank, but it requires control." He refuted the idea that the collapse of the bank was responsible for the Panic of 1837, which he describes as "a world-wide economic collapse", but conceded that it "may have exacerbated" the crisis. Remini partially defended Jackson's Indian removal policies.Remini 1984, p. 574 He held that had Jackson not orchestrated the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from their ancestral homelands, they would have been totally wiped out, just like other tribes—namely, the Yamasees, Mohicans, and Narragansetts—which did not move.
Remini's books on Jackson have generally received praise. Jon Meacham read Remini's trilogy in high school and later wrote his own biography of Jackson, which Remini read in manuscript form. Meacham said, "He was practicing a kind of narrative historical biographical craft at exactly the moment when most of the academy was moving toward intellectual and group-driven history." He described Remini as "someone who never believed that his interpretation was the last word." Meacham continued, "You cannot write about Jackson without standing on Remini's shoulders." Daniel Walker Howe, a historian who took a rather critical view of Jackson, speaks favorably of Remini, writing: "A forthright admirer of his subject, Remini is laudatory in his assessments of Jackson's achievements. At the same time, he is also a meticulous scholar who does not allow his prejudices to get in the way of the evidence he finds." Of Remini's trilogy, Joel H. Silbey says that "one comes away with the feeling that here is how Jackson saw himself, might have set forth his own case, and wished to be remembered." In his own biography of Jackson, historian H. W. Brands calls Remini's three volume series "[a] monumental work of research and exposition by the dean of Jackson studies." The final volume, Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845, won the 1984 U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction. Donald Cole described the full cycle of books as "excellent," commending Remini for "a full scale biography of Jackson based on modern scholarship" by way of clear prose, "skill in the use of chronology, and his ability to identify figures," and an "impressive command of the literature."