Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States (1901–09) and writer, naturalist, and soldier. He expanded the powers of the presidency and of the federal government in support of the public interest in conflicts between big business and labour and steered the nation toward an active role in world politics, particularly in Europe and Asia. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1906 for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, and he secured the route and began construction of the Panama Canal (1904-14). Roosevelt was the second of four children born into a long-established, socially prominent family of Dutch and English ancestry; his mother, Martha Bulloch of Georgia, came from a wealthy, slave-owning plantation family. In frail health as a boy, Roosevelt was educated by private tutors. From boyhood, he displayed intense, wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. He graduated from Harvard College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, in 1880. He then studied briefly at Columbia Law School but soon turned to writing and politics as a career. In 1880 he married Alice Hathaway Lee, by whom he had one daughter, Alice. After his first wife's death, in 1886 he married Edith Kermit Carow (Edith Roosevelt), with whom he lived for the rest of his life in Long Island, New York. They had five children: Theodore, Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin. As a child, Roosevelt had suffered from severe asthma, and weak eyesight plagued him throughout his life. By dint of a program of physical exertion, he developed a strong physique and a lifelong love of vigorous activity. He adopted “the strenuous life,” as he entitled his 1901 book, as his ideal, both as an outdoorsman and as a politician. Listen to a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt as he campaigned for the U.S. presidency, 1912 about “The Right of the People to Rule”.