Transcripts For CSPAN2 Diana 20240704

Good evening everyone. Hello. Is everyone good tonight . I am the marketing director at politics and prose. We are here to talk with diana parcell. Im really delighted about it. How many people have gone to see theow Cherry Blossoms the past w days and got caught in a traffic over the past few days . That was bananas, and as washingtonians we know that they are glorious, but the secret is through veteran neighborhoods. Ecso thats the secret. But we actually have them. Before we get to the meat of the evening i want to do some housekeeping. To take pictures, do whatever you want but nothing reading or blaring or doing all those things. We are happy about having them and we are Live Streaming on youtube. Also some other housekeeping things if you like what you hear tonight, and we know that you do and we are so happy you are here in the store. We still have some juicy things coming up and a few other housekeeping things. Whats going to happen here im just going to introduce diana for a few minutes. Shes going to talk. Shes a one woman show which is remarkable. Shes going to talk for a good 20, 30 minutes and tell you everything you needt to know bt now youre going to be totally obsessed. And then afterwards we are going to ask if you have any questions to do some qanda right here. Theres microphones behind this pillar. We do ask you to come up here and ask your questions through the microphone for a couple of reasons first of all so diana can hear them, that is important and also so they are captured on video. Any other housekeeping . The most important thing is you have to buy the book. Like that is why we are all here and after we do the qanda, diana is going to sign them so thats pretty cool. This is one of the few in person events that she is doing so get it while you can. And i have to say im very excited about the cherry blossom. I even gotot my nails done whici never do and for some reason i was thinking this year felt more cherry, blossom than previous years and i dont know what it is, but i do know that 111 years ago today, on this day, first Lady Nellie Taft and the japanese ambassador at the time in a small official delegation were in potomac park with their shovels doing the digging and planting those cherry trees that we now see varieties of sins and that is the beginning of what became the sort of famous cherry treein growth. Also the heroine of the book which was the name on everyones official washington then but for some reason we dont know her now andea thats what im excitd to hear about. She was everywhere during the gilded age, she was writing in alaska, japan, europe and when she would go places things that happen. I call her as alec, you her forrest gump. She was also prolific beyond belief and publishing nearly every day ines newspapers and magazines. She also helped Found National Geographic and d other things. I dont understand how she did it all then and why we dont know more about her now so im grateful to diana for writing this book. Diana herself is a former journalist that worked at theth National Geographic which is another tie, and she was also at the National Institutes of health and the American Association for the advancementc of science and washington post. She lived here in town and we are so happy to have her tonight. [applause] its a delight to be here. Politics and prose is special to any author and we all know that, so i felt quite honored to be invited to be here tonight. Wendy stole my introduction a little bit because i wanted to start by telling you today is really a special day because it was exactly 111 years ago today that the first trees were planted out of a batch of 3,000 trees that were donated from japan. Im going to tell you that story a little bit, but i want to again kind of reiterate what she told you about eliza. This is the most amazing woman youve never heard of. And why, if we have read so much about this, i have been living with her for almost ten years why havent we known more about her, she was a critical figure in bringing the cherry trees to washington and she had a remarkable career apart from that and then it essentially kind of disappeared for a century so why has that happened and how did i discover her . It wasnt here in washington. I was working in indonesia about 15 years ago and i bought a book a reprint of an 1897 travel log called java the guard enough that used by someone named er said more and i read this book and was very impressed at how it held up for a century. A lot of the things i read i have seen myself the descriptions were very vivid, it was informed and i found the voice quite engaging so i naturally wondered who was this guy and what took him here 100 years ago so i went to wikipedia and did a quick search and was totally blown away. There were not many details about her but it told me that the author was an American Woman named eliza said morere and shed written seven travel books and was the first person elected to the board of National Geographic in 1892 and then i read the she is widely credited as being the person that introduced the idea of bringing cherry trees to washington. How had i never heard of this woman . I lived here over 30 years and went to see the trees every year and never heard the name. So i was naturally curious. I was curious, for one thing about her involvement in the trees and what inspired her, how did that come about but it was also her story as a woman that intrigued me. How in the world did a woman of her era managed to achieve all the things she did . When i set out to find out more about her it was personal curiosity i did not have in mind at the time writing a book and i didnt know there would be enough. Id never written a book but it was the story i got deeper and deeper into i was astonished at the amount of information i found. At firstar it was slow going. I went to the library of congress, didnt find a lot. She appeared in biographical indexes about two dozen that told me she was a very important person in her day. I found copies of her seven books, the original copies. I found kind of a handful of her journalism but there was nothing on her personal life and no biography so i started to simplg piecing clues together and following them seeing where they would take me and i spent a couple of years going down to the library of congress three days a week just digging. For a while i didnt find a lot but then i had a huge breakthrough. One day, i dont know how, i was a couple of days into the research when i discovered she wrote her journalism under a pen name so i had been doing these searches and they had eluded me because of the name. Once i discovered she wrote under her middle name which was her middle name and maternal grandmothers middle name, once i started searching, i found a flood of material and in the end, i uncovered almost 800 newspaper and magazine articles shed written in her lifetime, but that the two things in particular that i found quite surprising, the first one was her record as a journalist. She became a journalist at the age of 19 in 1876 and this was well before women started going to work for newspapers like in the 1880s that is when they began to be hired in significant numbers but it was quite interesting to find it was a very vibrant group of women correspondence in washington, d. C. During the gilded age so after the war the newspapers were trying to attract more readers and one of the things they were doing was to run more womens news but they also wanted women correspondence because you know from the gilded age that that was kind of extravagant in washington there was a lot of entertaining and we had all these millionaire politicians that were trying to outdo one another so the entertaining was lavish and they felt we need women that can describe the ball down and who knew all these intricate social protocols of entertaining so there were a couple dozenfo womn in washington writing for newspapers around the country and we are not just talking boston or philadelphia and new , they were from sacramento, albany, syracuse so a couple dozen other than and they were some were credentialed to the press galleries on capitol hill. This was stunning to me because i never heard any of this and it was a an incredible story of history that wed not heard much about. The interesting thing was she got a job working as a Society Columnist for a newspaper in stn she wrote for them for about ten years and she did something a little different because the society ranged from around december 1st when congress started meeting until land. Thats when the whole social season occurred but come summer everybody left town. People with money went off to their homes, Country Homes and resorts. So what eliza did is she started traveling. She crisscrossed the country several times. She would report on destinations that most americans of course would never see in their lifetime. By doing this, combining society reporting and travel writing, she ended up making more money than some men in washington. Its an indication of her enterprise and just her hard work ethic. On one of these trips that she took, she left california and went there several times. She went a to alaska in 1883. Alaska had only been part of the United States for 16 years. People in america knew nothing about alaska. She was inspired by john you were. In 18791880, he made two trips to alaska to study glaciers. He traveled around the area in a canoeno with the assistance of half a dozen native americans, native alaskans and so eliza read about his travels and decides shes going to alaska. So she goes off to alaska on a steamer that is the only way to get there on those days is to take and go up the thousand mile passage that takes you from the sound all the way up to the alaska panhandle. Sout she did that and that joury turneded out to be historic because her captain of her ship andecided to take a detour and that was up into glacier bay. A ship never carried the tourists there before so she was one of the first people ever to set aside. It was later named for john. Other than him. So the point was she went back the following summer and repeated the trip and then turned her dispatches into the first travel log on alaska so that notebook was in 1885 and she went on to write about alaska after about 15 years. She wrote a second even more comprehensive book. So together, she was, with these books, they were the people that really promoted tourism to alaska for the first time in the the. So this is part of her legacy and its a pretty big one. Okay. Now we get to the next milestone in her story. She goes to japan for the first time. If that happens in 1885, the same year that her alaska book came out. So why japan . She had a brother that was in the consular service. He spent most of his 39 year career in asia and most of the time in japan so in the summer of 1885, eliza and her mother went off to visit george in japan and it became lifechanging for both of them. So she decides to live in japan with her son and what this does is gives eliza a parttime home in japan. She started writing about japann and wrote a very influential book that was published in 1891 and she became recognized as an ryauthority on japan a country people in america knew almost nothing about at the time. Besides having this parttime home she had a base for traveling around larger asia so she ended up writing books on java, japan, china, india. She wrote for many major magazines of the day so she had an extraordinary record. One of the fun things in the book is to find these episodes where she suddenly turns up like in the philippines after the spanishamerican war in 1899 and the day she arrives theres an insurrection. Its like this cant be true. This is why ive compared her to a forrest gump of her day that she rubbed elbows with lots of famous people and she was eyewitness to many historic events. So she became an expert on japan and of course thats where she got the idea for the cherry trees. A couple other things about her, she became as ive already mentioned at the first woman elected to the board of National Geographic. The geographic had been founded in 1888. She joined i think around 90 and they were so impressed by her reporting on alaska that they elected her the secretary of the society which made her the first woman ever to serve on the board. She took up photography, kodak just invented the box camera in 1888 so the first evidence i found was her in 1890 on a trip to alaska taking photographs of john at his cabin that he built the glacier. Not only did she photograph him but she developed a friendship with he and his wife and went for a month and stayed in his cabin with ap group of friends. So this woman didnt waste any opportunities. Anyway she went on to write for the geographic and wrote about a dozenph articles and contributed many photographs over the years. Some workers, others she collected in her travels but she was the mostio important figuren the history of National Geographic. She became an activist in the Early Conservation Movement and this grew out of her relationship with john. He was emerging at this time as isthe figurehead of the u. S. Conservation movement and eliza waswr there writing about it. She wrote a couple of very influential articles on wilderness preservation. She was an activist in helping to have Mount Rainier turned into a national park. Finally this is one of the other things that shocked me in my discovery of her is that i came to find out a number of scholars credited her as one of a handful of western traveler writers that opened china to mass tourism at the end of the 19th century so i knew she wrote a book on china and i thought i can kind of wrap that up in a page and a half but as i started finding these letters that shes writing to her editor it was amazing because she went to china probably a dozen times and had her finger on the pulse of all kinds of turmoil happening at the time. So she wrote her book on china and it was published the summer of 1900 at the same time the rebellion was happening so this was a woman that was just so on top of things. The part about china had to be a whole chapter because there was just so much there. So she astounded me as i think you can tell. It ended up taking me ten years to write her story and part of that was the cost of discovery. I know this book is only the beginning of her story. Its heavily footnoted because i found an obligation to document my sources because other scholars and resources can take thoseto and take the story further. Theres lots of questions of wecourse that i cannot answer about her and the one that always comes up, did she have any romantic relationships. And i cant answer that. I suspect not, but i look forward to maybe somebody coming up with some more enlightening answers to that question. So her involvement in the cherry trees, how did that come about . A lot of people were involved in that, and the story has gotten kind of muddy over the years because it is a complicated story. There were many people involved. It happened over many years. There were more than one batch ofou trees as you may have heard if you know anything about the history, so its all been kind of confusing over the years. As a part of what i was trying to do in the book is to sort out those eventsts to the best i cod based on the Available Evidence to find out the origin of the cherry trees. One of the interesting things i discovered is that eliza sid moores journalistic career was very heavily influential in shaping her vision of the trees as we know them today. Ive already told you she went in japan in 1985 for the first time so it was sometime in the 1880s that she got this idea that washington should have some cherry trees. She loved them and called them the most beautiful thing in the world and said why dont we have these in American Cities and parks . We need to introduce American Cities trees and in what better place than the Nations Capital which had this growing tourism. But there was an interesting thing that happened when i was researching the book and i was reading about her career as a correspondent and i came upon one of her columns and it was published iner november 1883, ad this is before she ever gone to japan. So she describes for the paper that shes writing for how she went off to the National Mall to report on this new project that the army corps of engineers just started to turn this swampy area down by the Washington Monument monumentinto a public park. It was a big wasteland. People complained about it for years. It was nasty and smelly so they finally said we are going to fill in this land and create a public park. She goes down to the National Mall in november 1883. She rides tor the top of the Washington Monument that is still under construction. She hast to ride the elevator that they used to carry the materials to the top and it was a platform elevator that had a cage that had pulleys that would swing out and drop stones into place so shees rides this to the top and describes that. She gets to the top and later she looks down and she sees this area that is just the beginning of potomac park and she said in her column one day this is going to be the largest and most beautiful park in the city, a place of magnificence and future administrations. So this tells us that by the latime she went to japan a few years later, she already had in the back of her mind and idea of a place in washington that would be perfect for a part of cherry trees, so that forced me to kind of rewrite the whole structure of my book because i thought i can the last third would be about the cherry trees but suddenly this pushes the story, because then we begin to see the evolution of her vision. So she came back to washington, she rose to the man in charge of the parks, the citys parks, the army corps of engineers and she suggests they should plant cherry trees along the potomac. They listen to her, they heard her out and then they ignored her. These were army corps of engineers officials. They had been trained at west point, they were very conventional in their ideas of what the landscaping should be for a public park, and it didnt include cherry trees. These were exotic, you know, so eliza kept at it and she tried probably at least three times over the years over a period of 20 years. Finally the break came in 1909 when mrs. Taft came to the white house. So, helen taft and William Howard taft were very interested in the development of potomac park. By this point, the land had been filled in and they were starting to develop the park. They were quite advocates of the project because they both believed in the idea of having a large beautiful park for public recreation. So, shed been trained as a musician and decided she was going to build a stand along the river and that it would be a place forr public concerts and people from all walks of life around the city could come there and enjoy the music. Well, this sounded a whole lot like what eliza had already been proposing in terms of creating a Cherry Tree Park along the river. S so once she heard about the plans, she sent her a note seeking her encouragementnt to include cherry trees, and helen taft, who actually lived in japan for a while, she had a great appreciation of japanese culture, jumped on the idea. So, suddenly these two women are partners in this project. So it was very exciting for me to find some documents in my research that i hadnt seen published anywhere else that told me Eliza Skidmore was the intermediary between taft and the japanese that eventually offered to donate to several thousand trees to the project. So, there were letters that showed where the writing to the japanese consult, new york city saying i just came from a meeting at the white house with mrs. Taft and she would love to accept your offer of these trees. Yo so of course if you know the story you know the first batch came. They were found to be invested, 2,000 trees, and they ended up destroying the entire batch. They were burned on the ground of the Washington Monument where the usda had storehouses. But they came back and said we would send a replacement badge, which they did grown under pristine conditions so that it took another year and a half to two years, so finally, in the spring of 1912, this replacement badge arrived in washington and as wendy has already told you, march 27, 111 years ago today, helen taft organized a little thecation ceremony for planting of the first of those trees and invited the japanese ambassador and his wife. So she was in her 50s when she finally saw the realization ofme this dream that she had at the time for almost 30 years. Im going to stop there. I think thats kind of given you the basics, and we certainly want to have time for questions. So im not going to do a reading from the book, but i hope that youu enjoy the book. She was an amazing person, and its what enabled me to live with her for ten years was this constant process of discovery to keep finding out these things about her and i cant wait until i learn more once people now have the beginnings of the records and the documents that lead us into even Greater Knowledge about her so thank you. [applause] thank you so much for that talk. Im curious with her history as a Foreign Correspondent in china and indonesia and all these other places, i know at the time there was a lot of imperialist attitudes from the west towards these places, so i was wondering to what extent did she buy into those were pushed back into those. Both. She was quite a humanitarian in her outlook and i do see that in and a lot of her writings that she also was a product of her day so she did also add times haveer the same imperialistic attitude that the west was superior, and so i do kind of address that in the book of it that she uses some language that we kind of find appalling today. She expresses some attitudes that would be considered racist, but at the same time, there are situations where you can see she was very much humanitarian and as an example, she early in her career there was a load of criticism of the chinese laborers on the west coast and she was appalled by that. P she said these are hardworking people and on and on but then she went to china and she was appalled at the conditions in china, so i think the distinction is that she was quite an egalitarian when it came to individuals, but i think that she in many cases was appalled by the institutions that were holding the people back. She was a great believer in human advancement. So she had these kind of dual attitudes on this situation so its not a clearcut attitude. Its nuanced. Concerning the first shipment of trees do you have any correspondence or thehe editoris or how that went over on both sides . I did read all the correspondence with the state department on both sides the japanese and the americans and the u. S. Department of agriculture. They said these had to be destroyed. They are going tou. Be a threato u. S. Agriculture. So it went back and forth and in the end of the japanese were very gracious and they said we understand the need to do this. We wouldnt have wanted to create any problems, so no, it is difficult but we appreciate the situation. Its great to be a culmination of this more than a decade of work and both of the roundtables and people talking about women who need to be discovered and to the extent that you are comfortable i know when you first explored this topic it was sort of pitched to the hundredth anniversary, and as you dog and you obviously found a t lot, many more things interesting to that you are commenting on the Research Process andge the years of tryig to get this book published i think people might be interested. The thing was we were in a womens History Discussion Group at the library of congress and so when i went and i started researching it was like why are there no records, why are they so scarce and these women who were experienced in womens studies said throughout history womens lives were thought not worthy of being documented. And they said a lot of womens history turns out in the papers of the mens in their lives. That would be filed away in a file folder that says other materials. This happened in my case. I ended up finding records about her and about two dozen other institutions. And so a lot of them had been overlooked. Some of the journalism had been overlooked because the Research Methods have changed over the years. We had a lot more digitized. People think you can find it all on the internet, and that is so wrong. But what the internet can do is it can give you an index to the collections here or there and you can use these search techniques to begin to find records. The newspaper records she had written for this paper 100 years ago, those newspaper records existed, but they were not coming up in my search until i found them in the databases at s the library of congress, so it was a collection of techniques. But i understand that this is a huge problem in researching womens lives. Congratulations onan your bo. One question i have. At the department of agriculture what this meant is that he would travel around the world looking for new nonnative varieties pcs and plans that could be imported into the United States in order to expand the agricultural crops and horticultural crops. So, David Fairchild he had gone to joppa s a year or two after d wrote her book in 1897. He admired her as a person very knowledgeable on plants and even at his office arranged to have her appointed an unofficial collaborator in the collection of plant specimens from china and japan. As he rode in the letter that i saw he said nobody knows more people in china and japan. But in one of his trips around c1902 independently discovered japanese cherry trees and was quite taken so he began independently studying them. He brought them to his home and had 100 or so imported to study them and see how they would do here in the washington area. So, eliza and thee fairchilds, he and his wife, they became allies and he organized a Publicity Campaign in 1908 i believe it was toto try to bring the cherry trees to washington. And they both kind of pursued this idea at the same time, and its an interesting part of the book because i found evidence that they wrote to mrs. Taft at the same time David Fairchild was sending a letter to the army corps of engineers park officials. And i founds out that his lettr sat on the desk for two weeks and in the meantime, mrs. Taft jumps into this project and runs with it. So, it was interesting, and i say in the book i dont know if they were acting in concert, or whether they were acting in competition. That is an openended question, and thats how i had to leave it in the book, but this is the David Fairchild situation. It seems from the records over the years there might have been a little bit of badd blood over the years because neither one of them referred much to the others contributions. So speculating there, but that is kind of my take on it. Congratulations and thank you on behalf of those who come from the tourism industry, i cantci even tell you how exciting it is to have a book about eliza. Some of us know her and talk about her as much as we can, but while this is so great, thank you. Im just curious if you, and the traveler that she was, theres a lot of comment about her trips to asia. Did you find any evidence of her traveling to places like latin america or africa . I did not. She went to europe a good bit. I didnt mention that she became quite an art collector, a collector of asian art. And she ended up having a collection around 250 pieces into some of them were pretty valuable and they were sold at auctions late in life. She went to europe a number of times and early in her career especially i have evidence that she went to europe several times and then later in her life, she went to europe. It turns out she was a ninth generation american. Her ancestors in england dated back to the 11th century. I and there is a manor house in england that is still, its no longer in the family, but it wasnt until not too long ago. Theres a pitcher of it i was so excited to find that i included in the book. So late in life, she went back to england after the war she did a little bit of reporting. She reported for several wars but not as a war correspondent, but as an observer. The japanese war, she was in washington during the civil war, the spanishamericanwa war, in e philippines and then world war i. She was still reporting during world war i and did a lot of reporting on the red cross and the relief efforts in europe. So, she goes to europe late in life and she actually moves to europe late in life. Part of this came from there was an act that was passed in 1924 that excluded the japanese from being allowed to citizenry in the United States. This exclusion act, and she was appalled by that. She was consideredd quite a friend of japan, and the emperor of japan actually gave her a metal, the highest civilian metal for her favorable reporting on the country and because she was considered a friend of japan. So she went to europe and moved to Geneva Switzerland and became a fan of the league of nations. She died in europe in 1928 and then her ashes were carried where her mother and her brother were buried. So this is part of the reason shes disappeared. She just kind of disappeared. And we did come across things that would say shes the one that introduced the idea but then it kind of got to then her whole history really kind of got overlooked for a century. It seems so unusual during that timeframe for there to be a single woman traveling. Did you encounter any evidence of resistance to that . I didnt find any evidence of resistance. She talks in her travels she will mention my friends and i, she nevere identifies whos shs traveling with. Avtheres times that shes probably traveling with her mother and at other times traveling with friends. There were episodes later in her life when it was clear she was traveling on her own with a local native and one she got so annoyed with him she sent him home because she found him so annoying but she would hire interpreters and people to accompany her so i think it was a little bit of both, but it was unusual for women to travel alone as younger women, but later in her life she was an established person and it was less unusual. But she did have help wherever she traveled. I can tell you she spoke the japanese language, she had b assistance and of course her brother being in japan meant that she had access to these diplomatic privileges. So, shes collecting art. R she can ship it home a lot cheaper than you or i could have at the time so this kind of helps explain some of the situations that enable her to travel places that a lot of people in japan would not have gone to. I chuckled when you said that the major security of the National Geographic board, the traditional roledi for a woman, did you come across any tension or, you know, in terms of her role with the leadership of the i didnt and we can say that yes it was because she was a woman, but she was a good writer. What better person to elect as the secretary of your organization . She was also quite a gogetter and a defender. There was an incident in the book where it has to do with when theds National Geographic sends an expedition, the very First Expedition to alaska. So, she gets wind of this and she, these guys come back from this expedition up the mountain and they are trying to ascertain whether it is the highest peak in north america or whatever, and they come back and they are going back to washington to report their findings. One of the guys in the group, one of the people in the expedition, he kind of blows the cover waiting to report those events. He starts blabbing to the press in california andd its all ovr the newspapers aboutr this youg typographer getting all thein credit instead of the scientists that led the expedition. She was furious about this and shes writing in her column there should be respect along ag the scientific organizations as much as there are between people. Ng so shes kind of nailing this guy in her column and so here she is defending it and they, the scientist whose honor she was defending, so she calls up her friends at the ap and says you need to interview this scientist, and they did. A column comes out in newspapers around the country giving credit to the actual scientist that led thein expedition. So she is this great defender of the geographic as she became its clear to them this is a woman who gets things done. And when youu think about an organization like that that depends on volunteers, she was the right person at the right time so she became a very important person in the geographic over the years. I cant even tell you, canen you expand a little bit on our noninvolvement in the National Geographic and the photography department, and wasnt she also involved in the creation of the yellow logo . I havent heard of that. So, she starts she has this relationship with the National Geographic for over 20 years, 25 years i guess, but she doesnt really start writing for she did write a few things about alaska before the turnofthecentury, but most of her work with the geographic came after the early 1900s and one of the reasons for that is that they got a new editor and he changed the format. 1905 use all this because up until then the National Geographic was a pretty scientific journal. It could be really boring. These people that were putting it out were scientists, geologists, and they were writing these really boring articles. So, inll Alexander Graham bell became the second president and said weve got to change this magazine if we are going to attract people to become membere of the geographic weve got to do something about this lousy magazine. And he believed in pictures and he said weve got to have pictures, pictures will make the readers excited. So, his soninlaw becomes the editor of the geographic and he introduces in 1905 kind of by accident the pictorial format. He finds hes got this issue coming out and its got 11 blank pages. He says what am i going to do. He has a package of photographs that have come across his desk that were these amazing photographs from tibet. He runs 11 photographs, each one a fullpage. This has just never been done before and people were so excited that the magazine just took off overnight and the membership just soared overnight. So now this guy Gilbert Grosvenor has struck this formula that is going to be the format of the National Geographic for the next century. So he needs photographs. Hes got to fill these pages. So, heal has eliza traveling in japan and china and korea. Hes got her out there looking for photographs. So she took a lot of photographs for the magazine, but what i found her legacy is that she acquired photographs. She would get them from all different kinds of sources and say heres a packet of 15 and he would say i love them, i want more. and she would say heres a packet. Of 90 and she was having some of these colored, hand colored so this is the period when the National Geographic for the first time started running color photography and she said iyouve got to start running in color. Youre wasting this opportunity. And it took a while because of the technology and the cost, but they did. So she was really right there working closely with him and that really is her legacy with of the magazine. Theres a lot of history in this book. Theres so many stories that i ended up having like 20 chapters. Its like im notot going to cor that or im just going to cover that in passing and i would get into it and her correspondence ended up there were a couple i found letters at the geographic, but the real valuable records were about 160 letters that she wrote to her editor in new york city at the century magazine and she became a writer for the century magazine. It was considered the top magazine of its day, the same magazine everybody read for president on down. So she was one of the leading writers and that is where she published a lot of her work in her letters to her editor that i found at the new york public library, they were fun to read because she is opinionated, shes telling you where shes going, they are gossiping, so there were a lot of fun and they were a really important resource in this book. She looks rather formidable in her pitcher. Did she have a sense of humor . What kind of personality . She definitely had a sense of humor and she was precocious from childhood. She actually grew up even washington. She came to washington as aea child. Shed been born in iowa, spent her early years in wisconsin. Wonderful gossip in the book where her moms story ended up being quite interesting. Mom had three marriages and the two of them were failed and included the divorce in 1848. When i found the evidence of this, it was just so like amazing, because i knew there was something questionable about this middle marriage. Well, then the third marriage is the marriage to elizas father so when that fell through in the middle of the civil war and eliza grows up here so shes raised by her single mother, she and her brother here in dc, mom ran a boardinghouse i think and she got a job at the u. S. Treasury. Or i could only find records for a couple of years. She might have gone there longer. The first year she went to there were records that showed she got high marks, she got prizes for reading, and spelling, and geography. She told an interviewer it laten life that as a child she love playing with a map and globe. I was always planning journeys she said. So this is something that interest her from a very young age. Many of these letters i have referred to she is a witty. She had a tendency to dramatize things. And to exaggerate things i think she mightve been a whole lot of fun to hang out with. She seems to have friends everywhere she had friends in high places. And yet she be off traveling under what we would consider you have this ability to ease her weight between different worlds. She seems to be a very likable person. There is a very moving letter after her death or her friends are saying i cannot believe that we have lost this a wonderful, sunny, optimistic person. And so you kind ofe see commens like that and some various correspondence. To tell you how rude admired and wellliked she was a page is probably aof pain in the but a t of the times she was a very strong woman. But she also was a very likable person. I was curious as well when she was persuading the army guys to try to the title base there mustve been a lot of botanical concerns there could these trees survive the d. C. Climate. I am wondering where she got her knowledge of botany from . She traveled quite a bit in japan. She wrote a good bit about botany. Wr she wrote about japanese gardens. She wrote a very definitive article in the century magazine about cherry trees when it became clear washington was going to get cherry trees she wrote probably the most important article that had been published at that point because americans do nothing about cherry trees. This is full of history about the cherry trees. And about what talented gardeners the wizards they were wizards that could take something in nature and transform it. The cherry trees were in the example. She picked up her knowledge over the years. The fact David Fairchild was even impressed with her knowledge is an indication. It was research. She is somebody who is curious and she found out things. Which it became quite clear in whatever she wrote she studied it to death which took up an interest in japanese morning glories. She ended up growing them at their house in japan. She ends up writing a 35 pages scientific paper that she delivered to the Japan Society in london and then had it publid in its journal. So that just goes to show she was like a dog. She would jew on this bone and keep at something which tells us about her persistence and not quitting that idea on the cherry trees. Thank you. Thank you all, thank you for coming weekends on the cspan2 are an intellectual feast. Every saturday in American History tv documents america stories. On the sunday book tube r brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan2 comes in these Television Companies and more including comcast. Are you thinking this is just a Community Center . No it is by more than ever comcast is partnering with 1000 can be dissenters to get wifi enabled so students from lowincome families can get the tools they need to be ready for