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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.

If we are genuinely searching for national healing and reconciliation, look at the aftermath of the election of 1800, which was as angry and mean-spirited as any in our history.
It is deeply imbedded into the idea of what we expect from our national government. Able to reliably deliver letters, prescriptions and ballots anywhere in the country, the Post Office has become more important than ever.
Trump is not the first president to portray his opponent as anti-religion or of the wrong faith. The tradition goes back to the beginning of the republic. But the controversy has gained momentum recently.
During the pandemic, a vehicle breakdown in the middle of Montana becomes a teaching moment on how a good Samaritan is seldom a person of one’s own stamp, which is the point of Luke 10: 25-37.
Who was the man who sculpted the controversial statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Natural History? He was no racist, but the messages of his famous figures have become problematic.
Of all the ways the 21st century might wish to memorialize Roosevelt, that statue was the least representative of the whole man, his staggering achievement and his largely untarnished place in American memory.
Thomas Jefferson was not the first choice to write the Declaration of Independence. He accepted the assignment reluctantly, but he brought genius to the project, including the 35 most important words in the English language.
The act of breathing, which we take for granted, has become the focal point in how we deal with racism, the COVID-19 pandemic and the air our modern society pollutes, killing millions every year.
Many of America’s founders were slaveholders yet wrote eloquently about the rights of man. To understand Jefferson, Washington and the rest, we need to see them for what they are, not for what we wish they had been.
In his review of Lindsay Chervinsky’s ‘The Cabinet,’ Editor-at-Large Clay Jenkinson finds a well-researched, thoughtful and fascinating book that points to the strength and the weakness of the U.S. Constitution.