Your TR Source
An excerpt from a letter Quentin Roosevelt wrote about traveling in France during the summer of 1909. He discusses seeing a flying show, Notre Dame, and the Louvre. He does not like French train travel and discusses subjects of photographs he has captured with his camera.
Sagamore Hill National Historic Site
1909
President Roosevelt discusses with his son Kermit which cameras he should bring on their trip to Africa. He believes that Kermit should definitely bring a Kodak, and plan on taking a lot of pictures to be sure there are good ones to choose from. Roosevelt is pleased with Kermit’s plan to take two trips to Geneseo to hunt and ride. He also is happy about his son’s efforts in the two-mile run. For his birthday, Roosevelt intends to go riding without Edith and take his horse Roswell over many jumps. Roosevelt discusses the rifles that W. S. Rainsford has offered to loan he and Kermit in Africa. In a postscript, Roosevelt thanks his son for the birthday wishes, and tells him about his day.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1908-10-27
New York attorney and Republican politician James R. Sheffield writes to President Roosevelt regarding the latter’s book, The Pastimes of the American Hunter, and a hunting trip Sheffield and his wife took to Maine. Sheffield describes albino deer, bull moose, and a tame buck he encountered on his trip.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1906-01-15
The “Book Reviews” section features three essays. In “‘The Negatives Are the Score the Prints Are the Performance,” Chris Foster examines Side Trips: The Photography of Sumner W. Matteson, 1898-1908. Foster looks at the development of photography equipment, especially Kodak cameras, notes the various locations in the American West, Mexico, and Cuba that Matteson documented, and pays particular attention to Matteson’s photographs of Native Americans and their culture. A photograph of a buffalo, a copy of which Matteson sent to President Theodore Roosevelt, accompanies the review and is the only illustration in the section.
In “A Tribute to George E. Mowry,” John Robert Greene reviews Reform and the Reformer in the Progressive Era.” Greene examines each of the essays in this tribute to George E. Mowry, a historian of the Progressive age, and finds a number of them disappointing, but he reserves special praise for an essay that provides an overview of Mowry’s career and for the transcript of an interview with Mowry from 1980.
John A. Gable reviews Peggy and Harold Samuels’s Frederic Remington: A Biography in “Remington’s West.” Gable notes the importance of Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister to forming Americans’ view of the frontier West, and he catalogs many of Remington’s illustrations, paintings, and sculptures, some of which belonged to Roosevelt. Gable pushes back against some of the criticism that the Samuels compile against Remington, and he notes Roosevelt’s admiration for the artist.