Where the words come from, how each speech was dated and placed, and what to keep in mind before you quote one.
Every full text here was printed in Roosevelt's lifetime and is in the public domain. Most come from Presidential Addresses and State Papers, the collection the Review of Reviews Company published in 1910, which gathers his addresses and messages from his first months as president to the end of his term. The publisher noted that Roosevelt took no payment from the volumes, feeling the addresses had been “dedicated to the public.” The rest come from The Strenuous Life, African and European Addresses, The New Nationalism, Realizable Ideals, History as Literature, California Addresses (San Francisco, 1903), which the California Promotion Committee published to gather the talks of his May 1903 tour of the state (“no address, it is believed, has been omitted”), and addresses printed as pamphlets, including the 1912 “Confession of Faith” and the speech he gave in Milwaukee after he was shot.
Where a volume has been proofread by the volunteers of Project Gutenberg, that text is used. The other volumes were read by machine from page scans at the Internet Archive; those speeches say so, and they will have stray errors until someone checks them against the page.
A printed address is the version Roosevelt or his staff released, which can differ from what the crowd heard. Some entries are labeled “From Address,” meaning the book printed only part of the speech. The Milwaukee speech is the newspaper's shorthand report, with the reporter's notes of cheers left in.
Hundreds more speeches are listed from the catalog of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, which has digitized the typed copies of his speeches kept in his papers at the Library of Congress. Many are the short remarks he made at small-town stops on his speaking tours. Their texts are not transcribed here yet; each one links to the scanned original.
Each speech points to its sources in this order: the Theodore Roosevelt Center first, then the Theodore Roosevelt Papers at the Library of Congress (Series 5, Speeches and Executive Orders), then the printed edition with a link to the page scan. Library of Congress links go to the microfilm reel and frame that the Theodore Roosevelt Center's scan comes from.
The Library is transcribing the typed copies of speeches kept in his papers at the Library of Congress, starting with the short remarks from his 1903 western tour. Each one is recorded exactly as the page shows it, with typing slips, words struck out and words added by hand. On the speech page, “Typescript” shows a clean reading text with those corrections applied, and “As typed” shows the page exactly. Where a speech was also printed, you can compare the typescript with the printed edition, which was often smoothed for publication.
Dates come from the printed heading of each address, or from the catalog record. For a handful of speeches the book gives no date. Those dates come from the Theodore Roosevelt Association's Chronological Record by way of Day by Day, and the speech page says so. Places are read from the same headings and placed on the map by town; a speech given at a fairground or a battlefield appears at the nearest town or landmark.
The collection holds what he said aloud: addresses, remarks and lectures. His annual and special messages to Congress are included too, because he wrote them to be heard by the whole country, but they are marked as messages and left out of the spoken view unless you ask for them. Proclamations and public letters printed in the same volumes are left out; proclamations belong with the Library's record of his executive actions.
Every dated speech with a known place was compared with Day by Day. Where the two put him hundreds of miles apart on the same day, or the document says it was a speech “to be delivered,” the speech page carries a note. A note means one of the two records may be wrong, not that the speech is.
Topics are found by counting key words, not assigned by a cataloger, so treat them as a guide. Word counts, phrase searches and the “words that stand out” lists all come from the printed texts, so a machine-read text with errors can shift a count slightly.
The speeches are shown as printed, without edits. Some passages, especially on race, immigration and empire, use language and express views of their time that many readers will find offensive. They are left as they are because the record should be accurate.
Treat any text here as a starting point. Check the wording against the original document, linked on every speech, before quoting it in print.
Speeches before 1899 and after 1912 are thin, and many of the campaign speeches he gave from 1912 on survive only in newspaper reports. Those are the next to add.
If a date, a place or a word looks wrong, write to hello@trlibrary.com with the speech and what you found.