“the English are most sensitive about my having stated that they had failed to do what they ought to have done, thanks to their lack of preparedness in advance; and this although I stated at the same time that we would have done infinitely worse.”

The complete text of an address by Theodore Roosevelt at a dinner given in his honor at the Hotel La Salle, Chicago, by the Illinois Bar Association on April 29, 1916. These proof sheets were sent to TR for his approval, and returned with 42 autograph corrections in pencil.

“I once used the phrase, to sum up our proper foreign policy:— ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’  There was a good deal of laughter over that phrase. But it expresses a pretty sound policy all the same. Remember, that I was President seven years and a half and that I never spoke with wanton harshness of any nation. I always spoke softly, I was always just as nice and polite as any man could be. But I carried a big stick!”

Evoking applause and laughter, Roosevelt also references the need for national preparedness considering the world situation, referencing Pancho Villa and Mexico, Germany and the war in Europe, the sinking of the “Lusitania,” and the need for national unity, paraphrasing Lincoln, “nowadays America can not endure half hyphenated and half not.”

Key political circular from the first-year Republican President written to influence off-year elections in New Mexico and other places. Harding justifies, and praises, the rapid postwar dismantling of America’s military by Congress, while backhandedly criticizing the inattention of his predecessor – Woodrow Wilson – to the peacetime transition. “Vast expenditure without proper consideration for results, is the inevitable fruit of war.”

In these two letters, J. Edgar Hoover offers general and specific advice to the Polaroid Company of Massachusetts to protect it against “foreign espionage and sabotage” as America tries to stay out of the world war ravaging Europe and Asia.

“Night after night I watch (the stars) and read your regards.”

From a limited edition of Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1948), limited to 1,426 copies. The war had ended only three years earlier, and Eisenhower must have been looking towards politics - he was elected to the Presidency in 1952.

“The Allied armies, through sacrifice and devotion and with God’s help, have wrung from Germany a final and unconditional surrender … The victory won in the West must now be won in the East. The whole world must be cleansed of the evil from which half the world has been freed…”

In a letter peppered with references to Middle Earth and its inhabitants, an exhausted Tolkien takes his first lengthy holiday in four years—in Italy. He returns and writes to Naomi Mitchison, a fellow novelist and his proofreader, for failing to provide feedback for her novel, To the Chapel Perilous. Tolkien discusses the demands on his time, ranging from his teaching load, thesis advising, and publishing, to reading critical reviews. Tolkien’s dissatisfaction with radio adaptations of Lord of the Rings occupies a prominent place: I think poorly of the broadcast adaptations. Except for a few details I think they are not well done... I thought that the dwarf (Gloin not Gimli, but I suppose Gimli will talk like his father...) was not too bad if a bit exaggerated. I do think of the “Dwarves” like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the language of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue. The balance of the letter discusses literary critics, reviews of Mitchison’s book, and anachronisms in her latest offering as contrasted to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.