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he discovered that the curriculum was not geared toward the sciences. It was, after all, a liberal arts college. He compensated through physical activities and a perfunctory interest in the courses that were available.
    One of his favorite professors was A. S. Hill, who taught English. TR developed a fondness for Elizabethan poetry, much to the amusement of some of his classmates.
    History was also a favorite subject of his. It stimulated his interest in politics, as one of the topics on which he concentrated was the Federalist Papers. Later in his political career, he often used them as a starting point for solving problems.
    Books over Studies
    One of TR’s major accomplishments during his time at Harvard was his authorship of The Naval War of 1812 , although TR belittled it later. He completed it years later when he was in law school.
    He noted in his self-deprecating fashion, “Those chapters were so dry that they would make a dictionary seem light reading by comparison.” Readers did not agree with his assessment after the book was published.
    TR commented that the chapters he wrote represented “purpose and serious interest on my part, not the perfunctory effort to do well enough to get a certain mark.” He revealed, “Corrections of them by a skilled older man would have impressed me and have commanded my respectful attention.”
    There is no telling what direction his education would have taken if that had happened. History turns on such little events.

Our Young Folks
    Although TR was an avid reader, textbooks were not his favorite source of knowledge. He said he learned more from his favorite magazine, Our Young Folks , than he did from any textbook he ever read.
    TR claimed that everything in the magazine “instilled the individual virtues, and the necessity of character as the chief factor in any man’s success—a teaching in which I now believe as sincerely as ever.” The magazine taught him the “right stuff,” which shaped his life.

TR believed “All the laws that the wit of man can devise will never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardful of the rights of others.”
    TR did not discount completely the value of the textbooks he used at Harvard. He acknowledged that he learned something from them, but they were merely supplementary to the other books he had read at home prior to entering college. It was from all those books combined that he learned the individual morality that he applied in every phase of his life.

A Photographic Memory
    TR may not have had a high opinion of textbooks or the lessons that complemented them, but he read them. They contained new thoughts and ideas that intrigued him. That explained why he read as many books as he did throughout his life and what facilitated the process.
    He possessed two valuable assets to help him satisfy his reading habit: a photographic memory and the ability to speed-read.

It was amazing to some people how much and how fast TR could read and retain. He could read a page while other people were reading a sentence or repeat stories from a newspaper he had just put down as if he were still reading it.
    TR could easily read two or three books a day. When TR traveled, he always took along a sufficient number of books to educate and amuse himself with. He also used reading as an escape—and he read some esoteric material at times.
    A classic example of his retreat into books occurred in the hours leading up to TR’s nomination as vice president at the 1900 Republican Convention. He was sitting quietly in another room, impervious to all the excitement. He was relaxing by reading Thucydides . His companion at the time, Albert Shaw, said he “was not reading the book as much as he was living it.”
    TR’s ability to read quickly and absorb information made him one of the most intellectually