Directors' Update
Hello once again from the Theodore Roosevelt Center! We’re hoping everyone had a happy Fourth of July. June was a spectacularly busy month for us at the Center. In 2025, the Theodore Roosevelt Center outlined its strategic objectives for the coming years. Among the goals was a fellowship program that would bring researchers to Dickinson State University to make use of our extensive resources. We are delighted to announce that we begin to realize that objective with the appointment of our first visiting fellow, Dr. Ryan Swanson. Dr. Swanson is a friend of the Center and a member of its advisory board. He is professor of history at the University of New Mexico Honors College, an esteemed sports scholar, and the author of The Strenuous Life: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete. Dr. Swanson will join the TR Center in the Fall semester (2026).
During his time at the Center, Dr. Swanson will work in two distinct realms. First, he will help shape the future of the visiting fellowship. We envision fellows coming to Dickinson each year and contributing to the university’s intellectual life. To do this, we need to develop a fellowship program whereby scholars can find ways to mix with students, faculty, and the wider community. Dr. Swanson will use his first-hand experiences as the Center’s first fellow to shape the program for future fellows. To this end, Dr. Swanson is also considering how athletics might play a part in the Center’s aspirations. Second, Dr. Swanson is working on a book. He will use the time at the TR Center to complete the manuscript.
The aim of the TR Center fellowship is to advance research in the area of Roosevelt Studies, develop the skills of scholars, and enrich the university. Scholars benefit with hands-on experience in the Center’s digital library and close proximity to the Center’s staff who are experts in the field. The Center will also provide accommodation and office space for fellows. This is how we aspire to build our network of friends and collaborators. Keep an eye out for the 2027 call for fellows.
In addition to making significant progress towards one of our strategic goals, we also kicked off our annual summer internship program to great success. Eight graduate students from across the country studying History and Library Science joined us remotely to learn about the work we do in our digital library and get hands-on experience researching and working with historical items. Their training carried them through the various steps of our workflow over the first four weeks of June, and they’re now off and running for the rest of the summer. They’ve been doing an excellent job so far, and we’re looking forward to working with them through the end of August.
With the digital library being contributed to by our summer interns, the TRC staff has had the chance to step into our physical archives to work for a bit. Archivist Ally Hecht has recently been able to undertake a project of ensuring our physical records are in order, and is working on transferring them into the back-end system of our digital library for better organization and maintenance going forward. This work is proceeding well, and is complimented by the continuing expansion of our physical archives. June alone saw the acquisition of two additional collections, with materials ranging from the life of North Dakota Rough Rider Jesse Langdon to framed political cartoons and more from Roosevelt’s lifetime. We’ve recently been able to purchase some materials to help us show off these physical collections in future exhibits, including a wall case that newly houses materials donated to us by the Commanding Officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) who visited the TRC last fall for our annual symposium.
Finally, we’ve also been busy with preparations for this past Independence Day weekend! We opened the weekend with a wonderful event featuring Co-Director Dr. Michael Patrick Cullinane’s newly released book, Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet, as well as a display of some artifacts from our more recently-acquired collections. This event led directly into a fantastic weekend featuring performances of the Broadway musical Teddy and Alice right here on the Dickinson State University. The Dickinson State University Theater Guild, in cooperation with the Badlands Opera Project, has mounted a production of the Broadway musical Teddy and Alice, supported heavily by the Theodore Roosevelt Center. TRC Public Historian Dr. William Hansard not only put on a series of public talks attended by the cast of the show to help them learn about their historical counterparts, but himself played the role of Theodore Roosevelt! The staff also created displays of historical artifacts to be exhibited during the shows, and sold Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth related merchandise during the shows. The performances went extremely well, and we were pleased to be a part of bringing such a great event to campus.
