Harvard University’s Houghton and Widener libraries jointly hold the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, the essential resource for Rooseveltian research. This collection comprises “correspondence of Roosevelt and his family, original manuscripts that include many of Roosevelt’s diaries, speeches, articles, and books, the archives of the Progressive Party and of many of Roosevelt’s biographers along with a vast collection of books and articles, photographs, political cartoons, and ephemera relating to both Roosevelt’s personal and professional life.” More specifically, the Widener’s portion of the collection contains books and articles by TR plus materials overlapping the Progressive Era (circa 1890s to World War I), and the Houghton Library’s subset holds nearly all published editions of TR’s works in addition to personal papers, 27,000 manuscripts, archival materials, photographs, etc. The Harvard University Library contains more than 11,000 such photographs digitized up to 1910 in these categories: General to 1905 inaugural; Childhood and youth, 1858–1880; Ranching in Dakota, 1883–1886; War of 1898; Pre-presidential political career, 1881–1901; Presidency, 1901–1909; Post-presidential years, 1909–1919; and Family. Researchers may examine these collections online via the online catalog HOLLIS (Harvard Online Library Information System), a clever “backronym” which pays homage to eighteenth-century library supporter Thomas Hollis. Additionally, the Library of Congress (LC) Manuscript Division holds 250,000-plus items in the preponderantly official presidential archive of the Theodore Roosevelt Papers.
In partnership with Harvard and LC, Dickinson State University’s Theodore Roosevelt Center has undertaken (according to its website) “the monumental task of creating a presidential digital library that will serve as a repository for all Roosevelt-related documents, photographs, and ephemera, providing instant access via the internet in a well-organized, comprehensible manner.” Other notable web pages are available at the websites for Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, TR’s home from 1885 until his death; the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historical Site in Buffalo, NY, where TR took the presidential oath of office on September 14, 1901; the National Park Service (NPS) Theodore Roosevelt National Park encompassing TR’s Dakota Territory Elkhorn Ranch; and Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, the NPS childhood home of TR reconstructed at 28 E. 20th St. in NYC.
An indefatigable letter writer (more than 150,000 by some accounts), TR wrote—according to Dalton’s perspectively nuanced Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life—”posterity letters,” that is “self-conscious missives intended for eventual public exposure.” TR transformed his personal philosophy of the “strenuous life” into a trope for the Progressive movement, with which he personally identified. Several epistolary collections have been published, most significantly Morison and Blum’s definitive, out-of-print eight-volume edition, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, some of which may be accessed online. In 1948, Morison became director of the Roosevelt Memorial Association’s (now the Theodore Roosevelt Association) Research Project and, afterwards, editor-in-chief of the Letters. Later, John M. Blum joined the project. Authorized and reviewed by TR before his death, Bishop’s two-volume “official” biography, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His Own Letters, authentically “supplements and completes” TR’s own autobiography. Bishop’s great-grandnephew explored Bishop and TR’s relationship in The Lion and the Journalist: The Unlikely Friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Bucklin Bishop. The following collections are also noteworthy: Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 1870–1918 edited by TR’s older sister “Bamie” (Bamie: Theodore Roosevelt’s Remarkable Sister, by Lilian Rixey); the non-Chesterfieldian A Bully Father: Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children; his son’s Letters to Kermit from Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1908; and Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Personal Military Aide. More recently, renowned historian biographer (T.R.: The Last Romantic) H.W. Brands’s The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt compiles 1000 letters inscribed to an international who’s who of TR’s contemporary luminaries. Arranged chronologically with minimal contextualization, “this compilation fully illuminates the private and public personas of one of the most accomplished men in American history.”
Theodore Roosevelt and His Time, Shown in His Own Letters (Classic Reprint) by 
