Matthew A. Wasniewski: Appointed the New Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives
Position:
Appointed the 4th House Historian.
Area of Research:
19th & 20th Century United States History, Diplomatic History.
Education:
Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park, 2004.
Major Publications:
Wasniewski is the author of"Walter Lippmann, strategic internationalism, the Cold War, and Vietnam, 1943--1967."
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2004, 664 pages. 
Wasniewski is the editor of Women in Congress, 1917–2006. 2d ed. Joint Committee on Printing. 2007; and
Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007. 3d ed. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on House
Administration, U.S. Government Printing Office, 2008.
Additional Info:
Formerly Historian and Deputy Chief, Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives where he was
responsible for the print and online editions of the
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress,
the House's website on Art and History, the print and online editions of Women in Congress, Black Americans in
Congress. He is also responsible for brochures about historical, archival and art-related information,
as well as other publications mandated by the House.
Wasniewski began his public history career at the Capitol Historical Society.
It was probably a combination of things. Like a lot of people who go into history, I'm pretty math-challenged,
but I love to read, so I read a lot of history books as a kid—a lot of books on World Wars I and II, and the Civil
War. We kind of bounced around a couple locations in northern Virginia, but we were never really far from Civil War
battlefields and historic sites. My dad, in his spare time, had a metal detector, so we would go metal detecting on
a private farm field and find these Civil War bullets, and that really got my interest going.
I actually went to college thinking that I wanted to write for a newspaper and worked for the college newspaper my
entire four years. I went to James Madison University and realized that I could do a double major fairly easily. My
roommates were history majors, so by sophomore year they had talked me in coming to take a few history courses.
I went, realized I could do a double major, and signed up for it. I think probably the one [undergraduate] course
that really got me hooked was a methods course taught by Skip Hyser. I think that was kind of the turning point
where I got hooked.
It was in U.S. history. I wrote a master's thesis on Walter Lippmann, who was a journalist. He was a critic of U.S.
Cold War policy, and so I focused on kind of a narrow range from 1945-52 and his criticisms on American policy. I
followed that up with a [PhD] dissertation, [which] looked at Lippmann from 1945-67 when he retired as a critic of
particularly American policy and southeast Asia. The archives [National Archives II] at the University of Maryland
are pretty much right on campus, and so you could go over to the archives after class and dig around for these
documents. We're spoiled here in the D.C. area because we have so many resources—the Library of Congress right
next door, the National Archives.
A lot of graduate schools (a lot of the history departments I should say) don't always do a good job advertising
their ability to place people in public history jobs, and I didn't know it going into Maryland. I kind of thought,
Well, I'd go in, get my PhD, and teach somewhere. It was only kind of gradually through association—going to these
different archives, getting involved in organizations, and meeting people who had graduated from the program at
Maryland who had public history jobs—that I realized there was this whole network out there of people who had these
great jobs where they're doing all histories, they’re writing, they're doing research, they're answering reference
questions. I only learned about that gradually at Maryland, kind of through my own poking around. I found that
there was a real network of folks in federal history offices from the National Archives to the State Department
to here on the Hill.
Well, my background in graduate school was definitely 20th century. Although in making the transition to study
Congress more than a decade ago, I really came to appreciate the 19th century. In particular, I hadn’t been so
acquainted with political science before studying Congress, so that’s definitely a field I've been reading a lot
more. I've come to appreciate the political scientist; they're a different kind of cat than historians. We like to
tell stories, and that's how we educate people. We're anecdote people, storytellers and writers. They're kind of
quantifiers [and] definitely love their numbers. I find a lot of what political scientists do provides a great
roadmap for what historians need to do when they think about an institution this large.
I'm part of a book group and read kind of broadly about U.S. history and some international history. At some point
I'd like to turn my dissertation into a book, so I have an interest in diplomatic history as well.
My official title is a mouthful: I'm the historian for the Office of History and Preservation under the Clerk
of the House from the U.S. House of Representatives, and I'm also the deputy chief for the Office.
Our office is unique in federal history in that we kind of combine functions that typically aren't all put together
under one roof. I'm in charge of the publications and historical reference side of our operation. In the last three
years, we’ve published a big volume along with the Senate Historical Office. In 2006, we published the update to
the biographical directory of the United States Congress, which is a print edition of a biographical reference
database that’s online; it’s been online for 10 years. This is the 16th print edition. It goes all the way back
to the 1860s. [This biographical directory] compiles information on all the members who have served in the House
and the Senate since 1789. It also includes the Continental Congresses, so it’s more than 12,000 people total.
We handle the House side of the biographical entries, and the Senate handles members of the Senate.
In 2007 we published a congressionally mandated book, Women in Congress, which was an update to a series that began
in the 1970s. This was the third edition [that] we greatly expanded. Of course there were a lot of women to write
about because the last edition of the book came out in 1990-91. If you broke the number of women in Congress in
half, which is above 250 at this point, that is the halfway point. More women have served post 1990 than had served
in all history up through that point. Just a couple of months ago, we published the third edition of Black Americans
in Congress, a book that also goes back to the 1970s. These two volumes are now part of a series of four books on
women and minorities in Congress. We’re just now beginning to turn our attention to the last two books in the series:
a book on Hispanic Americans and a book on Asian Pacific Americans in Congress. All of them cover not just the House
but also the Senate side, so we work pretty closely with the Senate Historical Office.
We answer a lot of reference questions, deal quite a bit with member offices, and get a number of reference questions
from the general public. In fact, the general public is probably our number one inquirer. We also deal a lot with
press questions.
In 2004, we started up the House's first oral history program where we interview long-time staff members—people who
worked on committees, people who work on the floor. Our first interview was a reading clerk in the House who actually
read the roll call for the Declaration of War on December 8, 1941. So he had all these memories of people on the
floor, he had memories of Jeannette Pickering Rankin, who cast the lone no vote against war. It's been interesting.
We’ve now got roughly about 100 hours of recorded memories [from] a couple dozen folks. We're really looking forward
to expanding that program.
Oral history is a very powerful tool for kind of putting a human face on an institution. I think part of the public's
misperception of Congress is [that] people don’t understand it; it's an intimidating thing to study. The presidency
is kind of at a human scale—we've had 44 presidencies. The House and Senate combined are in excess of 12,000 people—
it’s a huge institution. One of the challenges when I got interested in studying Congressional history was to take
that to an individual level, to be able to understand the institution, to humanize it. That’s a little bit of what
we do, that’s what oral history is. [We] try to put a human face on what goes on here—scaleable history so that an
individual can kind of connect with it.
I actually used to work at the Capitol Historical Society. I was in graduate school at the University of Maryland,
working on a degree in 20th century U.S. history, minding political and diplomatic history. I finished with my
coursework and decided that I needed to have some financing to support me working on my dissertation. I wanted to
move outside the department to get some practical experience. There was a job posting for a part-time position at
the historical society for an associate historian who would do research, and so I applied and got the job. [I] did
some historical work [and] also handled their publications. I have a background in journalism, and so I was
responsible for the newsletter and catalogues and talking to the press.
When this office was created in 2002, I saw the job advertisement and put my application in. [I] was very fortunate
that it worked out.
Originally published as part of"Jobs and Careers in History: Matt Wasniewski Interview – Part 1 & Part 2, By Jessica Pritchard, AHA's History Today, 2-23-09
QuotesBy Matthew Wasniewski
Despite these flaws and frequent reversals, there were powerful and persuasive consistencies that animated Lippmann's writings on foreign policy and the Cold War. Lippmann constructed a conceptual framework early in his career that eventually served as the centerpiece of his postwar analyses. The historian's curiosity which I soon cultivated for Lippmann was no less intense than my attraction to him as a journalist. As I pursued graduate degrees in 20th century political history and international affairs during the 1990s, the context of what was occurring around me imparted an entirely new dimension to Lippmann's columns. Sadly, straining to decipher 50-year-old Today and Tomorrow installments (on a microfilm reader of only slightly more recent vintage) proved a world more enlightening than the op-ed pages of most modern daily papers. The decade after the Cold War, with all its promise, contradictions, and disappointments badly needed a Lippmann-esque figure-but one never materialized. The 1990s in America, to borrow one of Lippmann's phrases, were years of drift rather than mastery. Soviet power receded revealing long-neglected domestic institutions and concerns. The Cold War, Americans realized, had been waged at significant social cost: crime-ridden and decaying inner cities, obsolete public transportation systems, declining schools, a compromised environment, and massive national debts. Americans gladly forfeited their global concerns for the pursuit of prosperity at home. Televised popular culture and the news media-often indistinguishable enterprises-served as a potent opiate for a surprisingly eager audience. The public knew more about the broken marriage of a football star accused of murdering his estranged wife, than it did about a Balkan war that killed thousands of civilians, threatened peace in Europe, and eventually required NATO's first military offensive. Americans gawked at presidential peccadilloes, but were blasé about the very same president's failure to act upon horrific genocide on the African sub-continent. American intellectuals fared little better, participating in their own myopic surfeit of"irrational exuberance" spawned by post-Cold War triumphalism.4 One prominent scholar-cum-policymaker even adopted Hegel's line that history was politics and, that since democracy had vanquished its 20th century rivals, communism and fascism, that history itself was perhaps nearing an"end." Even those whose approach was more tempered, surveyed the"American Century" and argued that the Wilsonian mission of creating stability by fostering democracy had been internalized implicitly-if not explicitly-by U.S. policymakers, and, moreover, was a successful program worth emulating in the 21st Century. -- Matthew Wasniewski in"Walter Lippmann, strategic internationalism, the Cold War, and Vietnam, 1943--1967.""The answer I've got is about as convoluted as the 50 state election laws themselves. I had to call over to the Senate Historical Office for an answer as to governors' appointment powers. Here's the gist of my conversation with them and what I know from my research for the Women in Congress book: First, the general trend is as your reader suggests: governors have the power to appoint only until the next general election. But that general rule is subject to the vagaries of a lot of complicated state election laws. There is no federal law that uniformly determines that a governor may make an appointment only up until the next general election. Moreover, in some instances, the actual swearing-in of a senator-elect to the remainder of a term can be delayed for personal scheduling reasons (for instance, the senator-elect may be occupying another elective or appointed office), thus extending the term of the appointee for a short amount of time. There are other examples of earlier and later women appointed to the Senate who, in fact, unlike Eva Bowring, served beyond the general election following their appointments (if only for a few weeks or months). One example is Elaine Edwards of Louisiana: Edwards (one of two women appointed by her husband to the Senate; Dixie Bibb Graves of Alabama was another) succeeded Allen Ellender after his death in 1972. She served from Aug. 1 to Nov. 13, when she resigned (a week after the general election) to give John Bennett Johnston, who had been elected on Nov. 7 to the full term commencing in January 1973, a seniority advantage. It may be that the election statute governing this example was peculiar only to Louisiana and, moreover, that it may have changed since Edwards served. I'm no expert on state election law. But there are several historical examples that would seem to provide the exceptions for which your reader was inquiring." -- Matthew Wasniewski about"Women in Congress: 1917-2006." in"Ready, Ames, Fire: The Iowa Straw Poll", NPR, 8-7-07About Matthew Wasniewski
"Dr. Wasniewski brings enormous experience and energy to the job of House Historian. His knowledge of congressional history, and his familiarity with cutting edge research and archival techniques make him the perfect candidate for this position. I want to thank Leader Boehner for working cooperatively throughout the appointment process, and supporting the work of the non-partisan, independent Search Committee." -- Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives (D-Calif.)