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Pocket Diary, 1898

Impatient for war and sensing the opportunities before him, Theodore Roosevelt recorded his impressions of unfolding events in a pocket diary, beginning with an entry dated April 16, 1898. Those brief observations were much more fully, and dramatically, narrated in The Rough Riders, serialized in Scribner's Magazine from January to June 1899.

Now the diary--part of the Harvard College Library's Theodore Roosevelt Collection, presented to the University in 1943--has for the first time been published in full, to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of San Juan Hill. The text includes facsimiles of all entries, an accompanying transcript, and relevant excerpts from The Rough Riders and Roosevelt's 1913 autobiography. The volume also contains a foreword by TR's great-grandson, Tweed Roosevelt '64; a preface by Wallace Dailey '62, A.M. '63, curator of the collection; an introduction by historian John Morton Blum '43, Ph.D. '50, LL.D. '80; and 17 full-page photographs from the collection, three of them reproduced here.

Pocket Diary, 1898 is available for purchase by check or money order payable to Harvard College Library ($30 paperbound, $125 in a case-bound, numbered, signed edition) from the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge 02138.


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