Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was an American politician, statesman, conservationist, naturalist, historian, and writer who served as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909. Roosevelt was a prolific author, writing with passion on subjects ranging from foreign policy to the importance of the national park system. Roosevelt was also an avid reader of poetry. In all, Roosevelt wrote about 18 books (each in several editions), including his autobiography, The Rough Riders, History of the Naval War of 1812, and others on subjects such as ranching, explorations, and wildlife. His most ambitious book was the four volume narrative The Winning of the West, focused on the American frontier in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Roosevelt said that the American character—indeed a new "American race" (ethnic group) had emerged from the heroic wilderness hunters and Indian fighters, acting on the frontier with little government help. The Political Works Essays on Practical Politics (1888) American Ideals (1897) The Strenuous Life (1899) Inaugural Address (1905) State of the Union Addresses (1901-1908) The New Nationalism (1910) Realizable Ideals (1912) Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916) A Book Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916) The Foes of Our Own Household (1917) National Strength and International Duty (1917) The Great Adventure (1918) Introductions and Forewords to Various Works The Historical Works The Naval War of 1812 (1882) Thomas H. Benton (1886) Gouverneur Morris (1888) The Winning of the West: Volume I (1889) The Winning of the West: Volume II (1889) New York (1891) The Winning of the West: Volume III (1894) Hero Tales from American History (1895) The Winning of the West: Volume IV (1896) American Naval Policy (1897) The Rough Riders (1899) Oliver Cromwell (1900) African and European Addresses (1910) History as Literature and Other Essays (1913) America and the World War (1915) The Hunting Works Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888) The Wilderness Hunter (1893) Hunting in Many Lands (1895) The Deer Family (1902) Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter (1905) Good Hunting (1907) African Game Trails (1910) Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914) Life-Histories of African Game Animals (1914) The Letters A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (1902) by James D. Richardson Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children (1919) The Memoirs Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (1913) Average Americans (1919)

President Theodore Roosevelt called himself a “book lover” and for good reason. From his boyhood days in the 1860s to the very end of his life in 1919, Roosevelt had a deep-seated passion for reading books. Wherever he went, he brought books with him. Whether he was rounding up cattle on a ranch in North Dakota, giving campaign speeches from the back of a train, governing the nation from the White House, or exploring an uncharted tributary of the Amazon River, he always made time to read books. Theodore Roosevelt and His Library at Sagamore Hill includes an overview of Roosevelt’s life as a reader, a discussion of the role that reading particular books played in shaping his life and career, and a short history of his personal library. The book also provides researchers and others interested in Roosevelt’s life with a complete list of Roosevelt’s books that are currently located at Sagamore Hill, his home in Oyster Bay, New York. The books in his personal library reflect his love of classic works of literature, his interest in history, and his fascination with the natural sciences. Theodore Roosevelt and His Library at Sagamore Hill concludes with an essay that Roosevelt wrote near the end of his life in which he reflected on his reading habits and commented on some of his favorite books.

We took breakfast-the eleven o'clock Brazilian breakfast-on Colonel Rondon's boat. Caymans were becoming more plentiful. The ugly brutes lay on the sand-flats and mud banks like logs, always with the head raised, sometimes with the jaws open. They are often dangerous to domestic animals, and are always destructive to fish, and it is good to shoot them. I killed half a dozen, and missed nearly as many more-a throbbing boat does not improve one's aim. -from Through the Brazilian Wilderness As much a symbol of the nation's adventurous past as he was the very picture of booming 20th-century progress, Theodore Roosevelt-politician and soldier, naturalist and historian-was still a young man when he left the Oval Office, and he spent the decade after his presidency exploring the world... and sharing his experiences in his inimitable prose. This two-in-one volume includes "an account of a zoogeographic reconnoissance through the Brazilian hinterland" Roosevelt undertook in 1913 for the benefit of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and a collection of essays on natural history from throughout Roosevelt's life, including "Birds of the Adirondack," written when he was only 18, and "The Wild Ostrich," completed just months before his death. Roosevelt's real-life exploits and observations of the natural world remain entertaining and insightful today, and continue to illuminate the life and character of one of the great American personalities. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Roosevelt's Letters to His Children, A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open, America and the World War, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, and Historic Towns: New York OF INTEREST TO: Roosevelt fans, readers of autobiography, amateur naturalists, armchair travelers American icon THEODORE ROOSEVELT (1858-1919) was 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909, and the first American to win a Nobel Prize, in 1906, when he was awarded the Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War. He is the author of 35 books.

Theodore Roosevelt's scientific curiosity and love of the outdoors proved a defining force throughout his hectic life as a rancher and explorer, police commissioner and governor of New York, vice president and president of the United States. Conservation and natural history were parts of a whole for this driven, charismatic public servant, and Roosevelt approached the natural world with joy and a passionate engagement. Drawing on an array of approaches--biographical, ecological and environmental, literary and political, Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist in the Arena analyzes this energetic man's manifold encounters with the great outdoors. George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and William Hornaday were among the many conservationists with whom Roosevelt corresponded, collaborated, hiked, and governed--and in turn, inspired. Together, Roosevelt and his contemporaries developed a progressive argument for the conservation of natural resources as a way to construct a more democratic nation-state. This legacy also comes with some troubling domestic and global implications, as Roosevelt fused his call for the conservation of resources--natural and human, domestically and internationally--with a deep-seated conviction that some were more fit than others to control the world and define its future.

Why have elephants—and our preconceptions about them—been central to so much of human thought? From prehistoric cave drawings in Europe and ancient rock art in Africa and India to burning pyres of confiscated tusks, our thoughts about elephants tell a story of human history. In Elephant Trails, Nigel Rothfels argues that, over millennia, we have made elephants into both monsters and miracles as ways to understand them but also as ways to understand ourselves. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including municipal documents, zoo records, museum collections, and encounters with people who have lived with elephants, Rothfels seeks out the origins of our contemporary ideas about an animal that has been central to so much of human thought. He explains how notions that have been associated with elephants for centuries—that they are exceptionally wise, deeply emotional, and have a special understanding of death; that they never forget, are beloved of the gods, and suffer unusually in captivity; and even that they are afraid of mice—all tell part of the story of these amazing beings. Exploring the history of a skull in a museum, a photograph of an elephant walking through the American South in the early twentieth century, the debate about the quality of life of a famous elephant in a zoo, and the accounts of elephant hunters, Rothfels demonstrates that elephants are not what we think they are—and they never have been. Elephant Trails is a compelling portrait of what the author terms "our elephant."

With his square, bulldoggish stature, signature rimless glasses, and inimitable smile—part grimace, part snarl—Theodore Roosevelt was an unforgettable figure, imprinted on the American memory through photographs, the chiseled face of Mount Rushmore, and, especially, film. At once a hunter, explorer, naturalist, woodsman, and rancher, Roosevelt was the quintessential frontiersman, a man who believed that only nature could truly test and prove the worth of man. A documentary he made about his 1909 African safari embodied aggressive ideas of masculinity, power, racial superiority, and the connection between nature and manifest destiny. These ideas have since been reinforced by others—Jesse “Buff alo” Jones, Paul Rainey, Martin and Osa Johnson, and Walt Disney. Using Roosevelt as a starting point, filmmaker and scholar Ronald Tobias traces the evolution of American attitudes toward nature, attitudes that remain, to this day, remarkably conflicted, complex, and instilled with dreams of empire.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “Colonel Roosevelt is compelling reading, and [Edmund] Morris is a brilliant biographer who practices his art at the highest level. . . . A moving, beautifully rendered account.”—Fred Kaplan, The Washington Post This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, marks the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine? Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, this masterwork recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. “Hair-raising . . . awe-inspiring . . . a worthy close to a trilogy sure to be regarded as one of the best studies not just of any president, but of any American.”—San Francisco Chronicle

A celebration of corn palaces, crop art, and butter sculpture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries