History and Activities
The late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted American historian, and William J. vanden Heuvel, then president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, New York, were the Founding Fathers of the Roosevelt Study Center (RSC). They thought that Middelburg, capital city of Zeeland, was an excellent place for the establishment of a European research facility specialized in twentieth-century American history. Their initiative, discussed with the Provincial Government of Zeeland in the years 1982-1984 resulted in the opening of the Roosevelt Study Center in 1986. The RSC is subsidized by the Provincial Government of Zeeland and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Private corporations and institutions sponsor particular programs of the RSC.
The RSC cooperates with Dutch universities in research projects, as well as with the Theodore Roosevelt Association and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in various ways. The center, for instance, annually awards the best Master Thesis on American History with the Theodore Roosevelt American History Award (TRAHA), which grants the winner a trip to the key sites of interest of the Roosevelts .
Furthermore, the RSC is also regularly organizer and host of conferences and lectures on U.S. history and culture as well as on European-U.S. relations .
The RSC is a founding member of the American Studies Network, a cooperation of the twenty outstanding American Studies Centers
in Europe . It has an annual newsletter, The Roosevelt Herald, and an inhouse publications series. Monographs written by RSC staff and collections of essays based on RSC conferences edited by RSC staff have been published over the years by publishing houses in Europe and the United States.
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Famous quotes containing the words history and/or activities:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)