Internet Explorer 11 is not supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.
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.

The author of a new book on the coronavirus discusses how political expediency and an immature public have impaired America’s ability to meet the challenges and what we have learned as a country and what we have not.
The preparations for President Biden’s as-yet-unscheduled State of the Union address are haunted by a 400-year-old conspiracy to decapitate the British government. What can we learn from the Gunpowder Plot?
When a president leaves the White House, he enters one of the most elite clubs. A book by two of America’s leading journalists looks at what binds these individuals together, given their personalities and politics.
The printing press and social media democratized communication in their respective times. They both turned the order of things on its head — for good, for ill, and forever.
The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced how central technology is to modern life, but perhaps we are losing something.
In 1800, the country struggled to survive its first transition of power between John Adams, America’s first one-term president, and Thomas Jefferson, thanks to political intrigue, chaos and panic.
With incoming President Joe Biden pledging to unify the country, author David French talks about the nation’s current divide, whether the country is in decline and the prospects for a lasting union.
Transfers of power, a hallmark of our constitutional system, often come with shocks to the system. Trump’s refusal to concede may seem unprecedented, but it’s not the first time this has happened.
Editor-at-Large Clay Jenkinson and Professor Ed Watts explore what insights can be gained studying the last years of the Roman Republic and whether that has particular relevance in our own time.
The election of 1800 was the first time power was transferred from one political party to another. Hoping for a smooth transition involving prominent Founding Fathers, the country ended up with a constitutional crisis.