WASHINGTON - After more than a decade without an official historian, the House is once again paying attention to posterity with the hiring of a University of Illinois scholar to document its storied past.

Robert V. Remini, in filling a position that turned contentious in the time of Newt Gingrich, already has plans to reach out to all members of the House and make sure partisanship doesn't poison the chronicling of the institution's history.

"I've found that most people don't know much about the history of the House itself, including the members," Remini said in an interview. "We're there to serve everybody irrespective of party affiliation or anything else."

Remini's appointment by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., took effect last week. He is the third person to serve as House historian.

The last one was Christina Jeffrey, a political scientist who was appointed in January 1995 by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and fired several days later.

Gingrich dropped Jeffrey over reports that she had told the Education Department nearly a decade earlier that a course seeking federal money should have included the Nazi point of view in a Holocaust segment and the Ku Klux Klan perspective elsewhere. The course was denied financing. Gingrich said later that she had been smeared and he was wrong to have fired her.

The 83-year-old Remini's two predecessors consider him a solid appointment, given his nearly 60 years of experience teaching history and more than 20 books under his belt, including more than a dozen on Andrew Jackson, as well as a coming book Congress commissioned on the history of the House.

The first House historian, Ray Smock, hired under a Democratic-controlled House in 1983 and fired when Republicans took control in 1995, called Remini a "first-class historian, and a good writer, and a good thinker, and a wise man."

Smock viewed the loss of his job as part of Gingrich's attempt to politicize the office, and said he is glad work he started years ago will finally be continued. "Newt made a bad mistake, as far as I'm concerned, and Denny Hastert, 10 years later, is correcting that."

Jeffrey also backed Remini, calling him a "great" historian and overqualified for the job.

Remini is ready to get down to business, with an oral history program as one of his first projects.

"There are so many people who have served in the House who are very important and still living," Remini said. "They need to be interviewed at length about their careers. We need to build up a file of historical autobiographies."

Remini wants to interview Tom Foley, Democratic speaker of the House from 1989 to 1994; Pat Schroeder, a former Democratic congresswoman from Colorado; Gingrich, Republican speaker from 1995 to 1998; Bob Michael, one-time House Republican leader from Illinois; and former Rep. Lindy Boggs, D-La., among others.

Once he figures out where his offices will be and gets his staff together, Remini expects to help plan exhibits at the new Capitol Visitor Center, now under construction.

He also wants to set up regular lectures for the public by former members of Congress as well as other knowledgeable people.

"The House really needs somebody who can remind them of all the great traditions, the history of the institution," he said. "This is how you come to really love the place, by knowing more about it and how it evolved."

Smock set up the House historian's office as something of a counterpart to the Senate Historical Office, which was established eight years earlier when then-majority leader Sen. Mike Mansfield, D-Mont., and Republican leader Sen. Hugh Scott Jr., R-Pa., together appointed Richard Baker as Senate historian in 1975. Baker still holds the position.

Jeffrey said critics mischaracterized the comments that cost her the job. She now calls her quick turnaround as House historian "as odd and unprofessional an experience as I've ever had in my life." One problem, she said in an interview, was that Gingrich never publicly explained why he wanted a political science professor to serve as historian.

Critics worried that she would be used to chronicle a revisionist history. She said she would have changed the office because she had planned to take on contemporary issues, trying to explain them by looking at the historical reasoning behind the structure of government.