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Theodore Roosevelt was a rugged environmentalist, avid nonconformist, and passionate idealist. That's why we're building him a Presidential Library.

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5 days ago

In the Room: Sixty Years on the Front Lines of History opens today in the Microsoft Gallery.

David Hume Kennerly won the Pulitzer Prize at 25 for his coverage of the Vietnam War and became chief White House photographer at 27. For sixty years he has shown what the job looks like at close range: the waiting, the arguing, the moment before the decision.

Still ahead this weekend:
• Today, 3–4 PM: Book signing and meet & greet with Kennerly (free)
• Today, 4–5:30 PM: In the Gallery, an after-hours walk through the exhibition with the photographer himself
• Saturday: An artist panel with Kennerly, Shane Balkowitsch and Chad Ziemendorf, a talk by Ziemendorf, a live wet-plate demonstration, and a group book signing

On view through January 10, 2027. Included with general admission; free for Members. Schedule and tickets at the link in our bio.

All Kennerly photographs © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.

#DareGreatly #InTheRoom #Photojournalism #Medora #NorthDakota by @trlibrary

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5 days ago

🚨 ONE WEEK AWAY! 🚨

The countdown to #TeddyCon is officially on!

Next week, we’ll gather in Medora, ND for an extraordinary weekend celebrating the life, legacy, and continuing relevance of Theodore Roosevelt.

From October 9–11, the Theodore Roosevelt Convention will bring together 250+ guests, leading historians, authors, scholars, performers, and TR enthusiasts for three days of history, conversation, entertainment, and exploration.

Co-hosted by the Theodore Roosevelt Association and the Theodore Roosevelt Center at the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, this year’s theme is LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD.

- Keynotes featuring John Avlon and Karl Rove
- The Authors Panel with Craig Blumenshine, Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Historian, Stacy A. Cordery, Author, and Kathleen Dalton
- The Badlands Panel with Duane Jundt, Rolf Sletten, and Doug Ellison
- Theodore Roosevelt Trivia hosted by Joe Wiegand
- White House Princess musical showcase
- Live music from Mason Via
- A live Talk About Teddy - Theodore Roosevelt Podcast
Plus! tours, exhibitors, receptions, and opportunities to explore the landscapes that helped shape Theodore Roosevelt.

The program is set. The Badlands are waiting.
ONE. WEEK. AWAY.
See you in Medora! 🤠

Learn More at www.theodoreroosevelt.org/teddycon

#TheodoreRoosevelt #TRAssociation #teddyroosevelt by @trlibrary

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5 days ago

#OTD in 1903, the President of the United States wrote to his thirteen-year-old son at boarding school, caught himself preaching, apologised for it, and then explained how he was getting through the job.

Kermit was in his second year at Groton and eight days short of his fourteenth birthday. The letter, as printed in "Letters to His Children," opens: "I was very glad to get your letter." Then:

"I would rather have a boy of mine stand high in his studies than high in athletics, but I could a great deal rather have him show true manliness of character than show either intellectual or physical prowess; and I believe you and Ted both bid fair to develop just such character."

And then he hears himself:

"There! you will think this a dreadfully preaching letter! I suppose I have a natural tendency to preach just at present because I am overwhelmed with my work. I enjoy being President, and I like to do the work and have my hand on the lever. But it is very worrying and puzzling, and I have to make up my mind to accept every kind of attack and misrepresentation. It is a great comfort to me to read the life and letters of Abraham Lincoln… his literally endless patience, and at the same time his unflinching resolution."

That is the whole letter. There is no closing.

Seventeen months later, the night before his inauguration, John Hay — his Secretary of State, and Lincoln's private secretary as a young man — sent him a ring containing a lock of Lincoln's hair. He wore it.

More at trlibrary.com — link in bio

#OTD #OnThisDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #PresidentialHistory #AmericanHistory by @trlibrary

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5 days ago

#OTD in 1902, Edith Roosevelt walked through the White House for the first time in nearly four months. It was still full of scaffolding.

The family had moved out in June. McKim, Mead & White had the greenhouses pulled down, the state dining room enlarged to seat more than a hundred, and the president's offices moved out of the White House proper for the first time, into a new wing to the west.

She spent about three hours there with her daughter Alice and her social secretary, Belle Hagner. They came in at the main entrance on the north front, along an aisle rigged from crash stretched on the scaffolding. The Washington Times reported the private dining room's stucco practically finished under its new dome-shaped ceiling, garnet hangings already up in the Red Parlor, and the stucco eagles with their flaring wings drawing praise from the party.

Her husband was not with her. Three days before, the Surgeon General of the Navy had opened his shin and scraped the bone. She wrote to Kermit that day that "Father is still in his wheeled chair," adding, "You can't think how cheerful a patient he is."

She had opinions about the house. On 21 August she told McKim where the portraits of the women of the White House should go — the downstairs corridor, "also the busts. It could then be called the picture gallery, and you know a name goes a long way."

More at trlibrary.com — link in bio

#OTD #OnThisDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #PresidentialHistory #AmericanHistory by @trlibrary

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6 days ago

Designed to be the most regenerative cultural building in the Americas.

@globaltravelermag and managing editor Aoife O'Riordan take readers inside the Library @snohetta shaped from the Badlands itself: a living prairie roof spanning 121,000 square feet, rammed-earth walls built from local soil, and a nearly mile-long boardwalk across restored landscape.

The goal is full Living Building Challenge certification, the world's most rigorous environmental standard, under a "Four Zeros" framework: zero energy, zero water, zero emissions and zero waste.

Read the full story at globaltravelerusa.com. Plan your visit through the link in bio.

Photos: @christopherfrederickjones via @globaltravelermag

#DareGreatly #TheodoreRoosevelt #Medora #NorthDakota #LivingBuildingChallenge by @trlibrary

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7 days ago

#OTD in 1899, thirty thousand men marched through a triumphal arch in New York City. The arch was made of plaster, and it was gone within a year.

The city had been at it for two days — a naval parade up the North River on the 29th for Admiral George Dewey, and on the 30th the land parade, formed at 122nd Street and Riverside Drive, starting south at a quarter past eleven and running some six miles to Washington Square.

Theodore Roosevelt was forty and nine months into his one term as governor of New York. He rode on horseback, in civilian clothes, at the head of the New York State troops, his adjutant general at his side. Major General Charles F. Roe rode far ahead of him, acting as grand marshal. The Tribune: "The Governor sat on his horse like a soldier, and even in citizen's garb showed that he had worn a sword."

The arch is the part almost nobody remembers. Charles R. Lamb designed it on the model of the Arch of Titus; the National Sculpture Society put twenty-eight sculptors to work covering it. It stood at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, built of staff — plaster over a wooden frame — because everyone assumed the money would be found to rebuild it in marble. It was not. The arch came down in 1900.

The Sun's headline the next morning: "SEVEN MILE THRONG." The Tribune: "There never were such crowds of people in New-York."

Manila Bay had been in May of the year before. The fighting in the Philippines was not over.

More at trlibrary.com — link in bio

#OTD #OnThisDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #AmericanHistory #PresidentialHistory by @trlibrary

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7 days ago

Shane Balkowitsch (@balkowitsch) has about fifteen minutes to turn a blank plate into a finished wet-plate portrait—and he's doing it in front of a live audience. Tickets purchased before 2 PM enter a drawing to be his subject, with a print of the plate mailed to the winner.

Saturday, October 3 | 2–3:30 PM | Barry Auditorium | $10 per person

Tickets: https://ow.ly/vsMw50ZRSZj

#wetplatephotography #ambrotype #photography #davidhumekennerly by @trlibrary

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8 days ago

#OTD in 1905, the President of the United States wrote to the president of Harvard to ask whether anything could be done about the photographers chasing his son around the Yard.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was eighteen and had been in his rooms a matter of days. The Washington Times had run him the day before under the headline "CAMERA FIENDS CHASE TEDDY, J.": "He was pursued by camera men, who snapped him wherever they got an opportunity… Roosevelt was very nervous, and did his best to keep out of range."

His father wrote to Charles W. Eliot from Oyster Bay:

"…they have been trying to take kodak pictures of him as he walked about the yard, and I suppose they will make similar attempts if he goes on the football field. I am inclined to tell him, if he sees any man taking a photograph of him, to run up and smash the camera, but I do not like to do this if you would disapprove."

About himself he was flat: "I care less than nothing about what they do or say about me, for I am entirely competent to defend myself…" About the boy he asked, "Is there no way he can be protected?"

What set him off was a story about money — that Ted had a room in Claverly and "had begun with a splurge." The room was a small one. But Claverly stood on Mount Auburn Street, which the Evening Star had already explained was "'The Gold Coast' or 'Millionaires' Row'" — and that same story noted, pointedly, that his father had lately been telling students to live in the plainest style.

What Eliot made of it is not recorded.

More at trlibrary.com — link in bio

#OTD #OnThisDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #AmericanHistory #PresidentialHistory by @trlibrary

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8 days ago

Swipe to watch an archive wake up. →

1. A letter Theodore Roosevelt wrote from the White House in 1903 to his son Kermit, away at school for the first time.
2. Read by machine, line by line.
3. Broken into what it actually contains — a handwritten letter, father to son, during the presidential years.
4. Connected to everything else in the collection, and open to anyone with a question.
5. And in Medora, you can stand in a room and ask him out loud.

Roughly 300,000 letters, photographs, and documents, held across dozens of separate institutions, are now searchable by anyone, from anywhere, for free.

As of this month, how it was built is public too: the research paper and the complete source code, released so any museum, library, or historical society can do the same with their own collection.

Thanks to @microsoft and the AI for Good Lab, who built this with us and then gave it away. And to the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, whose archivists have catalogued this collection by hand since 2007.

The full story is at the link in our bio.

#TheodoreRoosevelt #PresidentialLibrary #Museums #Archives #DigitalHumanities #AIforGood #Medora #NorthDakota #Badlands by @trlibrary

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9 days ago

#OTD in 1902, a surgeon opened the President's shin, scraped the bone, and left the wound unstitched so it could drain. Roosevelt was awake for it.

Three weeks earlier a trolley car had run into the presidential carriage at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, killing William Craig — the first Secret Service agent to die in the line of duty. Roosevelt was thrown clear with a bruised face and a bruised left shin. The shin was what would not heal. On 23 September, mid-tour, surgeons in Indianapolis drew two ounces of fluid off the bone and sent him home. In Washington he was put in a wheeled chair.

Five days later it was worse. The White House was being rebuilt, so the family was at 22 Jackson Place on Lafayette Square, and there, on the afternoon of Sunday the 28th, the Surgeon General of the Navy cut two inches over the tibia, scraped the bone smooth and left the wound open. Cocaine around the site. No general anaesthetic.

Edith wrote to Kermit at Groton the same day: "made a gash nearly two inches long and scraped his shin bone… and as soon as it was over he was lifted back into his wheeled chair and came into the sitting room" — where, she reported, he was already reading.

Five days after that he was still in the chair, leg propped up, when the coal operators and the miners' president came to Jackson Place.

Six years on, to Kermit: "The shock permanently damaged the bone."

More at trlibrary.com — link in bio

#OTD #OnThisDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #PresidentialHistory #AmericanHistory by @trlibrary

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9 days ago

Chad Ziemendorf (@chadziemendorf) photographed the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library from the ground up—concrete, crews, weather, and all. Join him for a look at how the building took shape and the work of documenting it.

Saturday, October 3 | 12–1 PM | Barry Auditorium | Free to all

Register: https://ow.ly/Kulv50ZRSBl

#photography #davidhumekennerly #presidentiallibrary taken in Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library by @trlibrary

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10 days ago