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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.

What we can learn from the tragedy and now vindication of the father of the atomic bomb.
The current detention of a young Wall Street Journal correspondent echoes a high-stakes game played by governments that dates back to the American Revolution.
Catholic Church doctrine was used to justify the world’s largest land grab and the resulting colonialism. It had an outsized role in shaping the United States and other countries of the New World.
A statue long considered a Renaissance masterpiece in Florence (and the world over) has now been deemed pornographic in Florida. Such a stark contrast in points of view — here or there — has a long history.
The forgotten legacy of President Benjamin Harrison, who paved the way for Teddy Roosevelt. His tenure was marked by a mix of contributions to civil rights and conservation even while making a naked grab on Indigenous land.
Our resident humanities scholar laments that we thought we were immune to the human condition. We were wrong.
The idea of secession did not originate with Marjorie Taylor Greene. It has been tried before. The question we need to ask is whether we are really ready to see what a Red and Blue America would look and act like.
Seared in America’s collective memory and pilloried in popular culture, Jimmy Carter delivered a speech 44 years ago that chose to tell the American people the truth, rather than sing the Song of America.
From the White House tennis courts to the Camp David peace accords, along with an energy crisis and a hostage standoff, Jimmy Carter had a singular vision of how things should work.
Things that go beep beep beep in the night are generating more heat than light. They always have. But history suggests that a little panic can be a catalyst for positive public policy changes.