The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is more than just a building. It is a celebration of one of the greatest American presidents. The Library is under construction at the fulcrum of TR’s story–in the Badlands, where the future Rough Rider discovered the value of a “strenuous life” and laid the foundational roots for the following chapters in his extraordinary journey.
Recently, @nytimes reporter Jenny Schuessler visited the TRPL site in Medora and captured the essence of why we're building this institution on this hallowed ground. During her visit, she was introduced to the many wonders of the Badlands.
Through her lens, we see the TRPL not just as a museum or a library but as a cultural hub for visitors from all over the world to learn about TR's legacy, his impact on American politics and culture, and his enduring values of civic duty, leadership, and conservation.
Schuessler wrote, "More than a century after his death, Roosevelt remains one of the most popular presidents, celebrated as a man of action, a muscular nationalist, an environmental visionary, a trustbuster or all of the above. He's a favorite of Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, Tom Brady, and LeBron James. Historians consistently rank him among the top five."
The story continues to share that "Planners say it will be among the most sustainable cultural institutions in the world, meeting the goals of 'zero energy, zero water, zero emissions and zero waste.' It will also be the only presidential library visitors can reach on horseback or mountain bike via the 150-mile Maah Daah Hey Trail. (Yes, there will be a hitching post.)"
We are grateful to the supporters who believe in our vision and are helping to turn it into a reality. With every classroom, every exhibit, and every convening, we aim to create a platform that inspires civic dialogue, thoughtful debate, and bold action. Visitors to the Library will be participants learning from--not just about--President Roosevelt and the natural beauty that inspired him most. Join us in creating a legacy that inspires generations to come.
To stay tuned on all things TRPL, visit our website and sign up for our newsletter! Link in bio!
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library will honor the life, legacy, and enduring relevance of America’s 26th president.
We hope every visit will inspire bold action and fearless participation In the Arena, and challenge all of us to dare greatly, think boldly, live passionately, and care deeply – just like T.R.
Learn more about the project at .
#theodoreroosevelt #getinthearena
Get ready for a groundbreaking journey as we embark on the construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library!
We're thrilled to share the first breathtaking aerial images of our site, where the legacy of one of America's greatest leaders will come to life.
This summer marks the beginning of a historic three-year project. Excitingly, the topsoil we move will find a new purpose on the Library's living rooftop.
Mark your calendars because, on July 4, 2026, the Library's grand opening will be an unforgettable part of the America250 observances, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of our nation's independence.
As we celebrate the Fourth of July, let's remember Theodore Roosevelt's timeless wisdom: true citizenship starts at home. Join us in honoring this remarkable leader and making history together.
Happy Independence Day, and let the adventure begin!
#TheodoreRoosevelt #GetInTheArena #happy4thofjuly
#OTD in 1910, former President Theodore Roosevelt walked in the funeral procession of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom — the official American representative at one of the most extraordinary gatherings of European royalty the world has ever seen.
Roosevelt had left the presidency just over a year earlier, in March 1909. Since then, he'd hunted lions and rhinoceros in British East Africa, climbed peaks, given speeches at the Sorbonne and Oxford, met the Pope, and dined with kings. By the time he reached Windsor for King Edward's funeral, he had become the most famous private citizen in the world.
The funeral itself was a spectacle of declining empires. Nine European kings rode together in the procession. So did the German Kaiser, the Russian Grand Duke, and a dozen princes whose dynasties would not survive the world war that was four years away. Roosevelt walked among them as the representative of a republic — a former president, deliberately untitled, by tradition walking rather than riding with the crowned heads of Europe.
For TR, it was a moment of pride for the office he had recently held and the country that had elected him. He believed in the American republic with a force that bordered on religious. Walking with kings and refusing their precedence — that was, in a real sense, his personal embassy on behalf of democracy.
#OTD #OnThisDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #TeddyRoosevelt #KingEdwardVII #Diplomacy #TRHistory #AmericanHistory
NEW EPISODE: Senator Mitt Romney on Formative Moments, Presidential Leadership, and the Question of Legacy
What keeps a politician anchored to his principles when every incentive pulls the other way? On the latest Good Citizen, Senator @mittromney traces the answer back to his father's kitchen table — where George Romney, a man who rose from government housing in El Paso to the governor's mansion in Michigan, never once confused success with worth.
Senator Romney joins host Ted Roosevelt V for a wide-ranging conversation about moral clarity, the outsized influence of presidential character on American values, and why he built a deliberate system to guard against self-rationalization during the impeachment trial.
"The human mind has the capacity to rationalize self-interest. It is something we are all subject to," he told Ted. "You have to begin by asking yourself, what are your most fundamental values and is obedience the truth and right and wrong, as you understand it, one of those fundamental values?"
He also offers a surprisingly grounded take on what it will actually take to rebuild common ground — and it starts with something simpler than you'd think.
Listen now: /podcast/good-citizen/senator-mitt-romney-formative-moments-presidential-leadership-and-question
#GoodCitizen #TheodoreRooseveltPresidentialLibrary #TRPL #MittRomney #Leadership #Citizenship #MoralCourage
#OTD in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt slept his third and final night in Yosemite, this time on the floor of the valley itself — at Bridalveil Meadow, with granite walls rising on every side and the falls audible in the dark.
The first night had been beneath the Mariposa Grove sequoias. The second, near Glacier Point, where he and Muir woke in five inches of fresh snow. By the third night, Muir had Roosevelt exactly where he wanted him: a president, on the ground, in the place itself, with a campfire and time enough to listen.
Muir made his case. Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove had been under California state control since 1864. The surrounding national park, created in 1890, formed a doughnut around them — a federal ring around a state-controlled core. Mismanagement, overgrazing, and unchecked tourism had taken their toll. The valley needed to come back to the federal government, unified with the park around it.
Roosevelt listened.
Three years later, on June 11, 1906, he signed the bill that brought Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove into the national park. The Antiquities Act, signed three days earlier, gave him unilateral authority to protect lands of "historic or scientific interest." He would use that authority eighteen times — at Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, Muir Woods, and elsewhere — before leaving office.
The Yosemite trip didn't create Roosevelt's conservation impulse. He'd had that since boyhood. But three nights under the trees, with a man who knew them better than anyone alive, sharpened it into urgency.
The next morning, May 18, he climbed back into Tom Gordon's stagecoach and made the sixty-seven miles to Raymond in ten hours — a speed record. The president left Yosemite at a gallop. The conservation he carried with him would last forever.
#OTD #OnThisDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #JohnMuir #Yosemite #Conservation #PublicLands #DareGreatly
Join us this coming Monday for a virtual program featuring Jeffrey Rosen, legal scholar, bestselling author, and CEO Emeritus of the National Constitution Center (@constitutionctr ) for a discussion featuring his book 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘶𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘺: 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘏𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘵𝘰𝘯 𝘷𝘴. 𝘑𝘦𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘐𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘉𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘖𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘗𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘯 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢.
Through the lens of Jefferson and Hamilton’s competing visions, Rosen will explore how enduring debates over liberty and federal power continue to shape American democracy today.
This event is free and open to the virtual public. Meet us at our YouTube, LinkedIn, or Facebook (all links in bio) at 5:30 PM MT/7:30 PM ET to tune in!
#constitution #democracy #america250 #theodoreroosevelt #liberty #program #bestseller
#OTD in 1903, day two of Theodore Roosevelt's camping trip with John Muir found the two men deep in Yosemite's high country, riding through alpine meadows and discussing what TR himself would later call "the whole subject of forestry and the preservation of the wild creatures."
Muir was, as one biographer put it, the perfect tour guide for the wrong tourist — except Roosevelt was exactly the right tourist. Muir tended toward mystical exuberance about wilderness, calling it "the inestimable wealth of the forests" and walking long distances to chase a single rare flower. Roosevelt was more practical, more political, but no less devoted to the country he was passing through. The chemistry between them was immediate.
Sometime that day, the two men reached a high vantage point — the Yosemite Valley spread out below them, the granite domes of the Sierra rising in every direction. It was the kind of place that makes serious people quiet. Roosevelt and Muir, normally two of the most loquacious men in America, are reported to have simply stood and looked.
The moment didn't end with a treaty signed or a proclamation issued. It ended with two men, slightly older than they had been the day before, planning what they would do.
#OTD #OnThisDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #TeddyRoosevelt #JohnMuir #Yosemite #Conservation #TRHistory
50 days.
We're at the halfway mark between when tickets went on sale and when the doors open. The countdown has a different energy now. Fifty days feels close. Fifty days feels real.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opens July 4 in Medora, North Dakota — and every one of those 50 remaining days is a day closer to telling the story that this landscape has been waiting to tell for 140 years.
T.R. arrived in the Badlands in 1883. He left a changed man. Now there's a place built to show you how and why — in the exact terrain where it happened.
50 days. Have you grabbed your tickets yet?
trlibrary.com/visit
#OpeningJuly4 #TRLibrary #TheodoreRoosevelt #Medora #NorthDakota #GrandOpening #CountingDown #50Days
Today is #EndangeredSpeciesDay — and Theodore Roosevelt's role in shaping how America protects vulnerable wildlife is hard to overstate.
When TR took office in 1901, the American bison was nearly extinct. Once numbering in the tens of millions across the Great Plains, the herds had been destroyed within a single generation by commercial hunting and federal policy aimed at undermining Plains tribes. By the early 1900s, fewer than a thousand bison remained alive in the entire United States.
Roosevelt's response was characteristic. In 1905, he served as founding honorary president of the American Bison Society, which was led by William Hornaday, the New York Zoological Society director and a conservationist Roosevelt deeply admired. In 1907, his administration shipped 15 bison from the Bronx Zoo to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma — the first federal effort to restore an endangered species to its native range. In 1908, he established the National Bison Range in Montana. By the time he left office, the federal government was actively breeding and protecting bison on multiple federal preserves.
The species is alive today because Roosevelt and his contemporaries refused to let it slip away on their watch. The principle they established — that the federal government has an obligation to protect endangered species — would eventually grow into the Endangered Species Act of 1973, signed by another Republican president, Richard Nixon.
So when you hear a meadowlark in a pasture Roosevelt protected, or see a bison on a refuge he helped establish, you're seeing the long arc of an idea: that we owe something to the wild creatures we share this country with.
#EndangeredSpeciesDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #TeddyRoosevelt #Conservation #BisonRestoration #TRPL
It's #PeaceOfficersMemorialDay — and we're thinking about a former NYC Police Commissioner who walked the Manhattan beat in the dead of night.
In 1895, Theodore Roosevelt was appointed to the Board of Police Commissioners of the City of New York — and quickly became the loudest, most visible reformer the department had ever seen. NYC policing in 1895 was a swamp of patronage, payoffs, and political interference. Cops paid for promotions. Captains protected favored saloons. Whole precincts operated as fiefdoms of Tammany Hall.
Roosevelt's response was relentless. He showed up at police stations unannounced. He walked patrol routes at 2 a.m. with reporter Jacob Riis at his side, looking for officers who weren't on their posts. He moved aggressively to fire or discipline officers for corruption or dereliction of duty — in numbers that shocked the political class. He insisted, against fierce political opposition, that the law applied equally — even, controversially, to the closing of saloons on Sundays.
Was he beloved by the rank and file? Not always. He stepped on toes. He alienated political allies. He earned editorial criticism and street-level resentment. But by the time he left the Board in 1897 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he had begun a transformation of NYPD culture that would take decades to complete — and he had given honest officers cover to do their jobs without paying tribute to bosses.
Today, on #PeaceOfficersMemorialDay, we honor the officers who give their lives in service. And we remember a former commissioner who believed deeply that the badge meant something — and who spent two years of his life fighting to make sure it did.
#PeaceOfficersMemorialDay #NationalPoliceWeek #TheodoreRoosevelt #NYPD #TRPL
#OTD in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt stepped off his presidential train at Raymond, California, climbed into a stagecoach, and began one of the most consequential camping trips in American history.
His guide was John Muir — naturalist, writer, founder of the Sierra Club, and the most passionate wilderness advocate of his generation. Muir had been pestering Washington for years to extend federal protection over Yosemite Valley. Roosevelt had finally said: "don't tell me about it; show me."
That first night was spent in the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. Roosevelt slept beneath the Grizzly Giant — one of the largest living things on earth — on a bed made up of forty wool army blankets that park rangers had laid down beneath the tree. Muir built a fire. The two men talked late into the night about glaciers, forest fires, sheep grazing, and the federal government's responsibility to protect what was here long before any of us.
It would be hard to overstate what those four days did to American conservation. By the time Roosevelt left Yosemite, he had decided to push for federal control of the valley. By 1906, Congress had returned Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to federal jurisdiction. Within a decade, his administration would protect more than 230 million acres of land — five national parks, 18 national monuments, and over 150 national forests.
It started here. With a stagecoach, a sequoia, and a man named Muir.
#OTD #OnThisDay #TheodoreRoosevelt #TeddyRoosevelt #JohnMuir #Yosemite #Conservation #PublicLands #TRHistory
