For Students

The Theodore Roosevelt Center uses FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) subject headings when we catalog items. While these are usually straightforward, they can occasionally be a little confusing. Check out their website – https://fast.oclc.org/searchfast/ – to see if there is a better word you could try searching for.

A primary source is an original item that is created by the person or in the period you are writing about. Many of the items in the digital library, like items written to and from Theodore Roosevelt, are primary sources. Artifacts, like campaign pins, photographs, or postcards, are also primary sources.

Things written after the fact about those primary sources are secondary sources. Books, magazine articles, and newspaper articles are usually secondary sources.

Sometimes an item can be both a primary and secondary source, depending on what you are researching. A modern article about Theodore Roosevelt can be a secondary source about Theodore Roosevelt, but might be a primary source about how Theodore Roosevelt is remembered.

If you have questions about whether something might be a primary or secondary source, feel free to ask us for help!

We have a paid annual summer internship program for graduate students in history, library science, and other similar fields, or for recent graduates of those programs. If you’re not on that track or not in a position where you can apply for that yet but you’d still like to get some experience, we also have a volunteer program to help catalog materials in the digital library.

Most all of the images we have available in the digital library are in the public domain and are available for use. A handful of collections request that we direct researchers to them to obtain prior permission. Please reach out to staff to make sure you’re getting the highest-resolution image available, and to learn about any potential restrictions on use.

The Theodore Roosevelt Center is in the process of transcribing some of its hard-to-read and handwritten items, but we may not have gotten to the item you’re looking at yet. Feel free to reach out to us via the Contact Us form, and we will send you a transcription of the document if we are able to!

For a general look at Theodore Roosevelt, we often recommend Kathleen Dalton’s book Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life as one of the best one-volume biographies of Theodore Roosevelt’s life. Edmund Morris’s three volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt; Theodore Rex; and Colonel Roosevelt) are also well regarded.

For more targeted portions of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, there are many good options, such as Carleton Putnam’s Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858-1886, Lewis L. Gould’s The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, Candace Millard’s The River of Doubt, or Patricia O’Toole’s When Trumpets Call.

A lot of people call Theodore Roosevelt by the nickname “Teddy.” This was common even during Theodore Roosevelt’s lifetime, and is why the toy is called a “Teddy Bear!”

While a lot of people call him that today, though, Theodore Roosevelt wasn’t often called it during his life by people who knew him. He wrote in one letter, “no man who knows me well calls me [Teddy]. No one of my family, for instance, has ever used it, and if it is used by any one it is a sure sign he does not know me.”

This isn’t completely true—we have accounts of his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, calling him Teddy (or Teddykins), and some magazine accounts of college friends remembering him in their later years, but by and large they do definitely remain outliers. When he was a child, his family nickname was “Teedie,”  and as a young man he occasionally went by “Thee” (after his father), but later in his life he was, “Mr. President,” “Theodore,” “Mr. Roosevelt,” or “Colonel.” You’ll most often hear the Theodore Roosevelt Center Staff call him simply “TR.”