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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.

After a stormy confirmation process characterized by partisan recriminations in the U.S. Senate, Ketanji Brown Jackson appears to be set to take her seat on the Supreme Court. More than three dozen others have been denied over the last 235 years.
Just 51 years old, nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, if confirmed, would join a growing list of relatively young justices who are likely to serve for much longer than was anticipated when lifetime appointments were first codified.
Congress’ “advice and consent” to the president on appointments to the judiciary has become sharply partisan — and the numbers prove it.
Our resident historian explores three things – court packing, judicial review and meeting the expectations of the appointing presidents – that are not what you thought they were.
The radicalization of a congressional clerk in the 1800s and the introduction of the telegraph set a young country on a new trajectory.
In 1788, Thomas Jefferson hastily wrote an account of his travels in Europe for two friends. That obscure guide sent a Virginia attorney on a journey that connects past and present in unexpected ways.
Concrete, steel and turbines play an outsize role in the past and future of water in western states.
Without Henry, there might not have been a United States. But the central role this sometimes forgotten Founding Father played in America’s Revolution and design of the young republic has been largely overlooked.
Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson and the struggle for a more perfect union.
Donald Trump’s remarks at a recent rally in Texas and polling results, in which a growing number of respondents justify violence against the government, keep last year’s Capitol riot in the spotlight.