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Jenkinson.field

Clay S. Jenkinson

Editor-at-Large

Clay S. Jenkinson is a historian and humanities scholar based in North Dakota. He is founder of both the Theodore Roosevelt Center and Listening to America.

Clay received a BA from the University of Minnesota, and an MA from Oxford where he was a Rhodes and Danforth Scholar. He is the author of thirteen books, most recently, The Language of Cottonwoods: Essays on the Future of North Dakota. He has appeared in several of Ken Burns’ documentary films.

Clay portrays such historical figures as Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He lives and works on the plains of North Dakota. He is the founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University in western North Dakota, dedicated to the digitization of all of Theodore Roosevelt’s Papers.

He can be reached at ltamerica.org.

Thomas Jefferson’s meaning has been up for grabs since he penned the phrase in 1776. The country has proven to be all too comfortable with the ambiguity. Depending how we answer the question, it could help redeem the reputation of the third president or leave us with a lesser Jefferson.
America has had resounding success in telling the story of its birth and rise as a nation. So too has Israel during the 20th century. Now, Palestine must do the same if it wants to succeed, says Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi.
Are the postmodernists and critical race theorists correct when they say America and some of its founders should appear with an asterisk behind their names from now on? The legacy of the Enlightenment and the American Experiment is in the balance.
A new book makes a multi-generational examination of the origin stories of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin to understand how they were shaped and by whom – their mothers.
Congress and state legislatures dealt with dozens of bills on voter identification and other legislative measures aimed at more full election integrity — but there is no agreement on what a more perfect voting process would look like.
Political gridlock and one-term presidents, are there recognizable patterns in how the Constitution plays out as the country moves through and beyond our times?
Imperial presidents, a diminished Congress and powerful judicial review. History and its players have shaped a Constitution that might surprise the framers.
Sandy Stosz, a self-described stubborn retired vice admiral, digests the lessons in leadership from a 40-year career in the U.S. Coast Guard.
Jealously guarded as the country's most sacred text, the highest law in the land is an artifact of history even as competing forces put demands on it to guide the country into the future.
The author of a new book on the pioneers of the civil rights movement says, as different as the two were from each other, they were also each other’s alter egos in the struggle against racism.