In its 18th annual public humanities symposium, the Theodore Roosevelt Center explores the idea of “freedom struggles.” These struggles are older than the nation itself, and Theodore Roosevelt, in words and in action, found himself on every side of the issue. That, in itself, is unremarkable—many Americans were of divided minds on questions of immigration, African American rights, women’s rights, the exclusion of Asians from the polity, and questions about the fate of Native American peoples. This Symposium aims to step into a still-difficult topic: what does freedom mean and who gets to define it?
Join us October 12-14 to hear from several award-winning scholars, including Dr. Ben Wetzel, who will speak on TR and religious freedoms; Dr. Julie Greene, who will speak on labor rights; Dr. Robert Bland, who will speak on Black politics in the Reconstruction Era; Michael R. D. Connolly, who will speak on TR's war against sex work in New York City; Pulitzer-Prize winning keynote speaker T. J. Stiles, who will speak on the tensions between progressivism and prejudice; and Poet Laureate of North Dakota Dr. Denise Lajimodiere. The authors will be available for book signings and will be brought together for a panel on the final day of the event. Also on the final day of the symposium, Theodore Roosevelt Humanities Scholar Clay Jenkinson will lead an educational hike in the Badlands, or you may join TR "reprisor" Joe Wiegand for a walking tour of the town of Medora.
The symposium's schedule will also include an opportunity to tour the exhibit gallery and library of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, which opened to the public during the 2022 Symposium. The Center's staff of scholars will be on hand to speak with visitors and answer any questions you may have as you tour the space.
This symposium is supported by grants and donations from various organizations, including Humanities North Dakota and the Rob and Melani Walton Foundation.
To register for the symposium, follow this link: https://dickinsonstate.hometownticketing.com/embed/all?depts=2
All event times are in Mountain Daylight Time. Schedule remains subject to change.
Thursday, October 12
7:00 pm - Keynote address by T. J. Stiles - "The Progressive's Prejudice: Theodore Roosevelt's Strange Stand on Race and Native Sovereignty"
8:45 pm - Reception with DSU TR Experts
Friday, October 13
8:15 am - Breakfast
9:00 am - Introductions by TR Center Director Dr. Chris O'Brien, Humanities Scholar Clay Jenkinson, and DSU President Steve Easton
9:30 am - Lecture and Q&A with Dr. Ben Wetzel - “Theodore Roosevelt and the Concept of Religious Freedom”
10:45 am - Coffee break
11:00 am - Lecture and Q&A with Dr. Julie Greene - "Inequality and the Fight for Labor Rights."
12:30 pm - Lunch
2:00 pm - Lecture by Michael Connolly - "The 'Little Tin Czar': TR’s Crusade Against Sex Work, 1895 to 1897."
2:30 pm - Lecture and Q&A with Dr. Robert Bland - "The Republican South's Last Stronghold: Robert Smalls, South Carolina's Republican Party, and the Long Coda of Black Reconstruction"
4:00 pm - TR Center Gallery and Library Viewing
Book sales and signings
5:30 pm - Dinner
7:15 pm - An Evening with the Poet Laureate of North Dakota, Dr. Denise Lajimodiere
Saturday, October 14
8:15 am - Breakfast
8:45 am - Discussion with Clay Jenkinson
9:30 am - Board buses for Medora
10:30 am - Speakers' Panel at the Rough Riders Hotel
12:00 pm - Lunch
1:00 pm - Hike in the Badlands with Clay Jenkinson OR Medora Walking Tour with Joe Wiegand
3:00 pm - Closing Reception at the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame
4:00 pm - Buses return to Dickinson
T. J. Stiles won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History for Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the 2003 Ambassador Book Award for Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. He is writing a one-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt.
Stiles will give a talk titled "The Progressive's Prejudice: Theodore Roosevelt's Strange Stand on Race and Native Sovereignty."
How do we reconcile Theodore Roosevelt's progressive policies and writings with his condescending comments on race and Native culture and sovereignty? T.J. Stiles examines how TR was far from alone in his seemingly contradictory views. From the Civil War on, the most progressive figures in American politics battled diversity and autonomy in an attempt to impose a single definition of civilization on all Americans.
Denise Lajimodiere is an enrolled Citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Belcourt, North Dakota.
Dr. Lajimodiere has been involved in education for forty-four years as an Elementary teacher, Principal, and professor, earning her Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate degrees from University of North Dakota. She is a retired Associate Professor from the School of Education, Ed. Leadership program, North Dakota State University, Fargo. She is one of the founders of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (N-NABS-HC). Denise is a poet – Dragonfly Dance; Thunderbird; Bitter Tears; His Feathers Were Chains; Children’s book author, Josie Dances, and academic book author, Stringing Rosaries: The History, The Unforgivable, The Healing of Northern Plains Boarding School Survivors.
Denise was recently named as North Dakota state Poet Laureate. She is the first Native American to hold that position. Denise is a traditional Jingle Dress dancer, Ojibwe Birch Bark Biting artist, and lives in a cozy cottage by a lake on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation.
Dr. Lajimodiere will be the feature of Friday night's program, "An Evening with the Poet Laureate of North Dakota."
Benjamin J. Wetzel is assistant professor of history at Taylor University. He is the author of American Crusade: Christianity, Warfare, and National Identity (Cornell, 2022) and Theodore Roosevelt: Preaching from the Bully Pulpit (Oxford, 2021), which received the 2022 “Best Book Award” from the Theodore Roosevelt Association. He is currently at work on a book project tentatively titled Door of Hope: Theodore Roosevelt and the Black Freedom Struggle.
Dr. Wetzel will give a talk titled “Theodore Roosevelt and the Concept of Religious Freedom.”
The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that the United States shall have no religious establishment and that its citizens may practice the religion of their choice. Yet in practice there have always been “insider” and “outsider” communities of faith in America. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era was a particularly important moment in the history of religious freedom as Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and other marginalized religions steadily grew in numbers against the backdrop of a strongly Protestant culture. How did Theodore Roosevelt interact with various religious constituencies throughout his life and why did he support religious freedom for (almost) all? Why was he so ecumenical at a time when most Americans professed strong denominational loyalty? This lecture will consider these question as we look at TR’s lifelong engagement with issues of religious liberty.
Julie Greene is a historian of United States, transnational, and global labor and immigration, and is a professor at University of Maryland College Park. She is the author of The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin Press, 2009), which received the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on the history of race relations. With Eileen Boris, Joo Cheong Tham, and Heidi Gottfried, Greene is co-editor of Global Labor Migration: New Directions (University of Illinois Press, 2022), and is currently working on two other book projects related to labor, migration, and empire. Her forthcoming book, Box 25: Archival Secrets and the World of Caribbean Workers, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press. She was founding Reviews Editor in 2004 of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, and beginning July 1 will become editor of the journal. Greene was the founding co-chair of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and served as its President from 2017 to 2019; previously she served as President of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2013-2015). Greene is also an Editor of the University of Illinois Press’s Working-Class in American History series. In 2011 Greene and Ira Berlin Co-Founded the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland, a center dedicated to generating knowledge of the history and politics of global migrations and U.S. immigration. Greene served as its Director until July 2021.
Dr. Greene will give a talk titled "Inequality and the Fight for Labor Rights."
The story of labor in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is often told as one in which workers gradually gained middle-class allies and successfully pushed the federal government to grant them fundamental rights. This essay takes a different approach by examining the ways immigration, gender, race, and US expansionism shaped workers' struggles for full and equal rights. Contested notions of citizenship and the nation divided the working class and ensured that the fight for equality would itself be an unequal struggle--with lasting legacies for twentieth century U.S. social movements.
Robert Bland is an assistant professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee. His research examines questions of race, memory, and political culture in the post-Civil War era. He is currently completing his first monograph, tentatively titled Requiem for Reconstruction: Race, Generational Memory, and the Afterlife of the Lowcountry's Black Political World.
Dr. Bland will give a talk titled "The Republican South's Last Stronghold: Robert Smalls, South Carolina's Republican Party, and the Long Coda of Black Reconstruction."
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Republican Party in the South was in a prolonged existential crisis. Having been under attack for more than three decades, the party now faced a new set of challenges in the form of a series of constitutional conventions that effectively dismantled the Fifteenth Amendment. With grassroots organizing and coalitional politics now no longer viable political options, the region's Republican political leaders, especially those leaders with a living memory of the Reconstruction era increasingly turned their attention north and sought to transform battles over federal patronage and representation in national conventions into larger referendums on the meaning of race and democracy. Ultimately, the battles over federal appointments in the lowcountry served as a coda in a "long reconstruction" in the South Carolina Lowcountry and highlight that battles over memory, race, and political rights persisted long after historians have traditionally framed the story of the Reconstruction era.
.jpg)
Michael R. D. Connolly was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and is currently pursuing his PhD at Loyola University Chicago, focusing on sexuality, policing, and politics during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Connolly previously attended the University of Calgary and the University of Ottawa where he received a Masters degree in history and a Bachelors degree in history and political science, respectively. Prior to entering the field of academia, Connolly was one of the first openly LGBTQ+ people elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta where he served from 2015 to 2019.
Connolly will give a talk titled "The “Little Tin Czar”: TR’s Crusade Against Sex Work, 1895 to 1897."
Before he assembled his Rough Riders for the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt was involved in a war on vice in New York City. Appointed by a reform administration, Theodore Roosevelt served as president of Gotham’s police commission for two years where he closely aligned himself with the Society for the Prevention of Crime and their mission to end police corruption, enforce the Sunday excise law, and close disorderly houses. The story of TR and the Sunday excise law is well known, but his war on sex work and brothels is often forgotten or ignored. This short presentation will explore TR’s relationship with New York’s sex workers and madams, the short-term consequences of his actions as police commissioner, and the ideological impact he had on the policing of sex work during the Progressive Era.
To register for the conference, follow this link: https://dickinsonstate.hometownticketing.com/embed/all?depts=2
The 18th Annual Theodore Roosevelt Symposium will be held October 12, 13, and 14. One may choose to register either for the entire symposium or for individual days. Ticket costs are as follows
· Full symposium - $135
· Thursday - $25
· Friday - $75
· Saturday - $50
The speakers' addresses will also be livestreamed, and a virtual attendance ticket is available for $25
LODGING options include:
LA QUINTA INN & SUITES BY WYNDHAM
6-minute drive from Dickinson State University
552 12th St W, Dickinson
(701) 456-2500
$79 plus tax - Standard Room King/Double Queen
Group Code: TRC ATTENDEES
Booking link: www.wyndhamhotels.com/laquinta/dickinson-north-dakota/la-quinta-dickinson/rooms-rates?&checkInDate=10/12/2023&checkOutDate=10/15/2023&groupCode=TRC%20ATTENDEES
Reservation deadline - October 1, 2023
ROOSEVELT GRAND DAKOTA HOTEL, SURESTAY COLLECTION BY BEST WESTERN
7-minute drive from Dickinson State University
532 15th St W, Dickinson
(701) 483-5600
$69 plus tax for standard rooms (2 beds), $99 for king suites
Reservation deadline - September 22, 2023
BADLANDS MOTEL
40-minute drive from Dickinson State University
501 Pacific Ave, Medora
1-800-633-6721
$99 plus tax - Thu $109 plus tax - Fri/Sat
Reservation deadline - September 12, 2023
ROUGH RIDERS HOTEL
40-minute drive from Dickinson State University
301 3rd Ave, Medora
1-800-633-6721
$139 plus tax - Thu $149 plus tax - Fri/Sat
Reservation deadline - September 12, 2023
TRANSPORTATION/TAXI SERVICE OPTIONS
Dickinson Public Transit: 701-483-6564
Daily 6:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
Dakota Taxi 701-334-6590
Home Town Taxi 701-260-1918
To register for the conference, follow this link: https://dickinsonstate.hometownticketing.com/embed/all?depts=2
