Informed, the republics rise better get informed straight from the source on cspan unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. From the Nations Capital to wherever you are. Because the opinion that matters most is your own. This is what democracy looks like. Cspan powered by cable. Good evening, everyone. O. Hello. Is every winter to that . My name is wendy wasserman, thea marketing director at politics and prose. Were here to talk about Eliza Scidmore with Diana Parsell per im excited about it im curious how many people of god to see the Cherry Blossom sent over the past few days . How many of you got caught in that traffic . That was bananas, right . As washingtonians will know the cherry trees down at the tidal basin are glorious the secret is they are better in the neighborhoods, right . Thats the secret takes to revise the schedule we even have them. So beforeor we get to the meat f the evening, i just want to do some housekeeping this is the time or tell you to turn off your phones, but take pictures, do whatever you want but nothing ringing arpae are doing all those things we have cspan here tonight we are really happy to have them. Were also Live Streaming on youtube, which is why we are at a microphone. Im also, some other housekeeping things, if you like what you hear tonight and we know that you do and were so happy youre here in this story, as you know we had events just about every night so we have a little cheat sheet of a calendar here so please come back here it is womens History Month even though its towards the end of it. Ittle housekeeping things. Whats going to happen here . So im just going to introduce diana for a few minutes. Shes going to talk shes a one woman show tonight, which is kind of remarkable. All we usually have to discuss it, but shes brave enough to go out on her own. Shes going to talk for a good 20, 30 minutes, tell you everything you need to know about this woman you didnt know anything about. But now youre going to be totally obsessed with that. Would be the book, thats my feeling about the book. And then afterwards, theres going to be were going to ask you if you have any questions, theres a microphone behind this pillar. We ask you to come up and ask your questions for the mic for a couple of reasons. First of all, so diana can hear them, thats really important and also so that were captured on video and audio. Any other housekeeping . The main most important thing, you have to buy the book. [laughter] right, thats why were all here and after we do the q a, diana is going to sign them. So thats pretty cool and this is one of the few inperson events that shes doing so get it while you can. And i have to say im excited about the Cherry Blossoms and i even got my nails done to celebrate the Cherry Blossoms which i never do, and i do know that 111 years ago today, nellie, and a small official delegation were in potomac park with the shovels and doing the digging and planting the trees and thats the beginning of what game the famous cherry tree grove and the heroine of our book. Eliza scidmore. And for some reason we dont know about her now. She was everywhere during the gilded age, she was writing in alaska, and japan and europe and shed go places and things would happen. And you call her forest gump, and she was also prolific beyond belief and publishing nearly every day in newspapers and magazines and she also helped Found National Geographic and other things and i didnt understand how she did it all then and i really dont understand why we dont know more about her now so im grateful to diana for writing this book. And diana is a former journalist and at the National Institutes of health and National Science and the Washington Post and she lives here in town and were so happy to have her here tonight. So, its all yours. Thank you, with en wendy. applause its a blight to be here. I mean, politics and prose is pretty special to any author and we all know that and so i felt quite honored 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 and im going to tell you that story is little bit, but i want to, again, kind of reiterate what she told you about Eliza Scidmore, the most amaze woman you never heard of. And why, if we have read so much about this well, you havent read it, but ive been living with her for almost so 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 she essentially kind of disappeared for a century. So, why has that happened and how did i discover her . Well, it wasnt here in washington. I was working in indonesia about 15 years ago and i bought a book, a reprint of a 1897 travel log called java the garden of the east by someone named er scidmore and i was impressed how it held up for century. A lot of things i had read in that, i had seen myself. The descriptions were very vivid. It was very informed and i found the voice quite engengagi, so i naturally wondered who was this guy and what took him to java 100 years ago. So i went to wikipedia and did a quick search and i was blown away. There were not many details about her, but the author was an American Woman named Eliza Scidmore. That she had written seven travel books. The first person elected to the board of National Geographic in 1892 and then i read that shes widely credited as being the person who introduced the idea of bringing cherry trees to washington. How had i never heard of this woman . I had lived here over 30 years, i went to see those trees every year and i had never heard the name elize sa scidmore. So i was naturally curious. I was curious for one inning about her involvement in the trees, 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 manage to achieve all the things she did. So when i set out to find out more about hadar, it was personal curiosity, i did not have in mind time to write a book. I had never written a book. But it was her story that i got deeper and deeper into, i was astonished at the amount of information i found and now its first, it was slow going. I went to the library of congress. Didnt find a lot. She appeared in biographical indexes and told me she was a pretty 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 there was no biography. So, i started simply piecing clause 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 and just digging. And 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 years into the research when i discovered that 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 that she wrote under her middle name ruhama, and her maternal grandmothers name, a biblical name, once i started searching, i found a flood of material and in the end, i uncovered almost 800 newspaper and magazine articles Eliza Scidmore wrote. And there were things really that i found quite surprising. The first one was her record as a journalist. She became a journalist at age 19 in 1876 this was well before women began working for newspapers when they were hired in significant numbers. It was interesting to find there was a vibrant group of women in washington during the gildled age. After the civil war, 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 correspondents because of course, you know, from the gilded age that that was kind of extravagant in washington, there was a lot of entertaining and you had all of these millionaire politicians that were trying to outdo one another so that the entertaining wag lavish and the editors felt that we need women that can describe the cut after ball gown and who knew all of these intricate social protocols of entertaining in washington. So, there were a couple dozen women in washington writing for newspapers around the country. And were not talking just boston or philadelphia or new york, they were from sacramento and albany and syracuse, so, a couple dozen of them and they were somewhere actually credentialed to the press gallery and capitol hill. This was stunning to me, i never heard any of this. Its historical washington history that weve never heard anything about. She got a job for working as a Society Columnist for a newspaper in st. Louis. She wrote for them for about 10 years and she did Something Different because the Society Season raged from around december 1st when congress started meeting until lent. Thats when the whole social season occurred, but come summer, everybody left town. The people with money went off to their homes and the Country Homes and their resorts, so what eliza did was she started travelling. And she crisscrossed the country several times. She would report on destinations that most americans would never see in their lifetimes. So by doing this, combining society reporting and travel writing, she ended up making more money than some men in washington. So she was, you know, its an indication of her enterprise and just her hard work ethic. So in one of these trips that she took, she loved california. She went there several times. She went to alaska in 1883. Now, alaska had only been part of the United States for 16 years. People in america knew nothing about alaska. Eliza was inspired by john newer, so in 1879 and 1880 he made two trips to alaska to study glaciers. He traveled around the area with a canoe with the assistance of half a dozen native americans, native alaskans, so eliza read about his travels and she decides shes going off to alaska. She went on a mail steamer, the only way to get to alaska in those days take the steamer go up the 1,000 mile passage from puget sound all the way to the alaska panhandle. And she did that and that journey turned out to be historic because her captain of her ship decided to take a detour and that detour was up into glacier bay. A ship had never carried tourists up into glacier bay before so she was one of the first people ever to set sight of the glacier, it was later named for him. Other than him, so the point was she went back the following summer and repeated that trip and then she turned her dispatches into the first travel log on alaska. So that book was in 1885 and she went on to write about alaska for about 15 years. She wrote a second even more comprehensive book, so together she was with these books, she and newer were the people that really promoted tourism to alaska for the first time in the late 1890s. This is part of her legacy and its a pretty big one. Next we get to the next milestone in her story, she goes to japan for the first time and that happens in 1885, the same her that her alaska book came out. Why japan . She had a brother in the Consular Service and he spent most of his 39year career in asia and most of that time in japan. So eliza and her mother went off to visit george in japan and it became life changing for both of them. So, mrs. Scidmore decides to live in japan with her son and it gives eliza, a parttime home in japan. She started writing about japan. She wrote a very influential book on japan that was published in 1891 and she became recognized in america as an authority on japan, a country that people in america knew almost nothing about at the time. Besides having this parttime home in japan, she had a base for travelling around larger asia so she ended up writing books on java, japan, china, india. She wrote for many major magazines of the day. And so, see she just had an exordinary record and one of the things was to find one of these episodes where she suddenly turns up like in the philippines after the spanish american war in 1899 and the day she arrived theres an insurrection and its look, this cant be true because i keep reading these things and this is why i have compared her to a forest gump of her day, that she rubbed elbows with a lot of famous people and she was high witness to many Historic Events so she thats where she got the ideas of the cherry trees. Couple of i think so this about her, she was the first woman elected to board of National Geographic. The geographic founded in 1888 and she joined is around 1890 and they were so impressed by her reporting. Her pioneering 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 about this time in her life and kodak just invented the box camera in 1888. So the first evidence i found with her in 1890 on a trip to alaska taking photographs of john at his cabin in the glacier. Not only. She developed a friendship with him and his wife and she side in stayed in a cabin with a group of friends. This woman didnt waste any opportunities. She wrote for the geographic. And she contributed photographs, and she was the most important figure, the most important female figure in the early history of National Geographic. She became an activist in the Early Conservation Movement and this grew out of her relationship with john muer. He was emerging at this time of the figure head of the u. S. Conservation movement and eliza was in there writing about it and she wrote a couple of influential are the acles on wilderness preservation. She was an activist in helping to have mt. Ranier turned into a national park. Finally, this is one of the other things that shocked me in my discovery of her is that i realized i came to find out that a number of colors credit her as one of a handful of western traveler writers who opened china to mass tourism at the end of the 19th century. So i knew she wrote a book on china and i thought, oh, i could 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 she had her finger on the pulse of all kinds of turmoil that was happening in china at the time and so she wrote her book on china and it was published the summer of 1900 at the same time the boxer rebellion was happening in peiking. So this was a woman who was just so on top of things. So, the part about china ended up having to be a whole chapter there was so much there. She astounded me as i think you can tell. It ended up taking me 10 years to write her story and part of that was the constant discovery. And i know this is book is only the beginning of her story. Its heavily footnoted because i felt an obligation to document my sources because other scholars and resources can now take those sources and take the story further. There are lots of questions that i cant answer, did she have any romantic relationships and i cant answer that. I suspect not, i think she was a spinster, 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 . The story was muddied over the years. Its a complicated story. There were many people involved. It happened over many years. There was more than one batch of trees, as you may have heard, if you know anything about the history. So its all been kind of confusing over the years. So part of what i was trying to do in the book was to sort out those events the best i could based on the Available Evidence to find out the origin of the cherry trees. And one of the interesting things i discovered is Eliza Scidmores career was influential in shaping her vision of the trees as we know them today. Ive already told you she went to japan in 1885 for the first time so it was sometime in 1880s that she got this idea that washington should have some cherry trees. She loved them. She called them the most beautiful thing in the world and she said why dont we have these in American Cities and parks. We need to introduce American Cities, trees and what better place than in the Nations Capital which had this growing tourism. But there was an interesting 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 in november 1883. And this was before shed ever gone to japan. So she describes for the readers in st. Louis for the papers shes writing for how she went off to the National Mall to report on this new project that the army corps of engineers had just started to turn this swampy area down by the Washington Monument into a public park. It was a big wasteland. The Potomac River would come up to the base of the monument. People would complain, it was nasty, smelly, and people said were going to fill this in for a public park. She does down to the National Mall in 1883 and she rides to the top of the Washington Monument which is still under construction. She has to ride the platform elevator which the workmen used to carry the materials to the ton and it was a platform elevator that had a cage, an open sided age with pulleys that would she sees this area that is just the kings of potomac park and says one day this is going to be the largest and most beautiful park in the city for future administrations. This tells us by the time she went to japan a few years later, she already had in the back of