Raymond Smock

Ray 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. He is Director Emeritus of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, West Virginia. With Louis Harlan, he co-edited the fourteen-volume Booker T. Washington Papers. He is the author of Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (2009).

Ray has spent the past five years as an essayist bearing witness to the Trump campaign and his presidency and has written three books on Donald Trump. His critical essays, written in real time as the Trump presidency unfolded, offer a penetrating analysis of the most controversial president in American history.

His first book on Trump appeared as an Amazon book in 2018. It is: Trump Tsunami: A Historian's Diary of the Trump Campaign and His First Year in Office. Smock's second work on the Trump presidency is: American Demagogue: Critical Essays on the Trump Presidency (2019), His most recent book, published in late September 2020 is: Bearing Witness to America's Worst President: Essays on the Trump Disaster. This book also contains a selection of key essays from the first two volumes.

Smock has had careers in academia, business, and government service. 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 PhD in American history at the University of Maryland in College Park.