And i didnt. Okay. Good evening, everyone. Hello. How high is everyone . Good tonight. Hi. My name is Wendy Wasserman and im the marketing director here at politics and prose. We are here to talk about Eliza Scidmore with diana parsell. Im really excited about it. Im curious how many people have gone to see the Cherry Blossoms . Say over the past few days how many people got caught in that traffic . Over the past few days . That was bananas, right . And as washingtonians, we all know that the cherry trees down at the at the bar, at the turtle bay, some are glorious. But the secret is theyre better in the neighborhoods. Right. So thats the secret. But thanks to Eliza Scidmore, we actually even have them. So before we get to the meat of the evening, i just want to do some housekeeping. This is the time where i tell you to turn off your phones, but take pictures, do whatever you want, but nothing ringing or blaring or doing all those things. We have cspan here tonight. Were really happy about having them. Were also livestreaming on youtube, which is why we are at a microphone. Im also some other housekeeping things, if you like what you hear tonight and and we know that you do. And were so happy that youre here in the store as you know, we have events just about every night. So we have a little cheat sheet of a calendar here. So please come back. It is womens history month. Even though its towards the end of it, we still have some more juicy things coming up and a few other cute little 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 me, 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 as to do some q a right here. Theres a microphone behind this pillar. We do ask you to come up here and ask your questions through the mic for a couple reasons. First of all, so diana can hear them, thats really important. And also so there are captured on video with the audio. Okay. Any other housekeeping . Oh, and the main most important thing is, you have to buy the book, right . Like thats why were all here. And after we do the q a, diane is going to sign up. Yeah, so thats pretty cool. And this is one of the few inperson and events that shes doing. So get it while you can. And i have to say im very excited about the Cherry Blossoms. I even got my nails done to celebrate the Cherry Blossoms, which i never do. And for some reason, i was thinking that this year felt more Cherry Blossom me than previous years. And i dont know what it is, but i do know that 111 years ago today, this day, first Lady Nellie Taft and the japanese ambassador at the time, and a small official delegation were in patel mc park with their shovels doing the digging and planting those cherry trees that we now see varieties have since. And that was the beginning of what became sort of the famous cherry tree grove and also on hand that day was the heroine of her book a Eliza Scidmore, which was the name on everyones official washington. Then. But for some reason we dont know her now. And thats what im really excited to hear about. She was everywhere during the gilded age. She was writing in alaska and china and japan and europe. And when she would go thing places, things would happen. I call her zelig. You call her forrest gump, but she was also prolific beyond belief and she was actually publishing nearly every day in newspapers and magazines and she also helped Found National Geographic and lots of other things. I really dont understand how she did it all then, and i really dont understand why we dont know more about her now. So im really grateful to diana for writing this book. So diana herself is a former journalist who worked at a National Geographic, which of course, is another title, Eliza Scidmore. And she was also at the National Institutes of health and the American Association for the advancement of science and the washington post. She lives here in town, and we are so happy to have her tonight. So janice and mikes all yours. Thank you, wendy. Now its it its really a delight 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 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 3000 trees that were down dated from japan. And im going to tell you that story a little bit, but i want to, again, kind of reiterate what she told you about Eliza Scidmore. This is the most amazing woman youve never heard of and why i if we have read so much about this, why you havent read it, but id been living with her for almost ten years. Why havent we know more about her . She was a critical figure in being the upbringing, 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 an 1897 travelog called jaw the the garden of the east by someone named e r sid moore. And i read this book and i was very impressed at how it held up for a century. A lot of the things i read in that i had seen myself, the descriptions were very vivid, it was very informed and i found the voice quite engaging. And so i naturally wondered, who was this guy and what took him to a job a hundred years ago . So i went to wikipedia and did a quick search and i was totally blown away. There were not many details about her, but it told me that the author was an American Woman named Eliza Scidmore, or that she had written seven travel books, that she was the first person elected to the board of National Geographic. In 1892, and then i read that she is widely credited as being the person who introduced the idea of bringing cherry trees to washington. And 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 eliza skidmore, so i was naturally curious. I was curious for one thing about her involved and 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 her, it was personal curiosity i did not have in mind at the time writing a book. I didnt know if that would be enough 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 now. At first it was very slow going. I went to the library of congress, didnt find a lot. She appeared in by a graphical index is about two dozen which 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 clues together and following them, seeing where they would take me. And i spent a couple of years going down to the library, 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 it 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 rahama, which was her middle name and her paternal grandmothers name. Its 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 in her lifetime. But the things that i that were two things in particular that really that i found quite surprising and the first one was her record as a journalist. She became a journalist at the age of 19. In 1876. Think about that. 1876. And this was well before women started going, going to work for newspaper papers, like in the 1880s. Thats when they began to be hired in significant numbers. But it was quite interesting to find that there was a very vibrant group of women correspondents in washington, dc during the gilded age. So after the civil war, the newspaper owners 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 these millionaire politicians that were trying to outdo one another. So the entertaining was lavish and they felt the editors felt we need women that can describe the cut of a bulk down and who knew all these intricate social protocols of entertaining in washington. So there were a couple of 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 some were actually credentialed to the press galleries on the capitol hill. Well, this was stunning to me, because id never heard any of this. And it was a credible story of washington history that weve really not heard much about. Well, the interesting thing about eliza was she got a job then working as a Society Columnist for a newspaper in st louis. She wrote for them for about ten years, but she did something a little different because the Society Season ranged 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 their Country Homes and their resorts. So what allies did was 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 time. 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 wasnt speier by john muir. He had he had an interest in glaciers. And so in 1879 and 1880, he made two trips to alaska to study glaciers as he traveled around the area in a canoe with the assistance of, you know, half a dozen native americans, native alaskans. And so eliza read about his travels. And so she decides shes going to alaska. So she goes off to alaska on a mail steamer that was the only way to get to alaska in those days was to take a mail steamer and to go up the thousand mile passage that takes you from puget sound all the way up to the alaska panhandle. So 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 muir glacier or oh, it was later named for john muir. I mean, 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 travelog 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, comprehend two book. So together she was with these books she and mew, or were the people that really promoted tourism to alaska for the first time in the late 1890s . So this is part of her legacy and its a pretty big one. Okay, so now we get to the next milestone in her story. She goes to alaska. Im sorry, she goes to japan for the first time. And that happens in 1885. The same year that her alaska book came out. So why japan . Well, she had a brother who was in the consular service. He spent most of his 39 year career in asia and most of that time in japan. So in the summer of 1885, eliza and her mother went off to visit george in japan, and it became life changing for both of them. So mrs. Skidmore decides to live in japan with her son and so what this does is it gives eliza a Part Time 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 Part Time Home in japan, 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, and so she just had an extraordinary record. And i one of the fun things in the book is to find some of these episodes where she suddenly turns up like in the philippines after the spanish american war in 1899 and the day she arrives, there was an insurrection. And its like, you know, this cant be true because i keep reading these things and this is why i have compared her to a forrest gump of her day that she rubbed elbows with lots of famous people and she was, i witness to many historic events. So she became an expert on japan. And of course, that is where she got the idea for the cherry trees. A couple of other things about her. She became, as ive already mentioned, the first woman elected to the board of National Geographic. The geographic had been founded in 1888. She joined, i think, in 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. Kodak had just invented the into the box camera in 1888. So the first evidence i found was her in 1890 on a trip to alaska, taking photographs of john muir at his cabin that he built in muir glacier. Not only did she photograph muir, she developed a friendship with him and his wife. She even went for a month and stayed in his cab and with a group of friends. So this woman, she she didnt waste any opportunities. So anyway, she went on then to write for the geographic. She wrote about a dozen articles and she contributed many photographs over the years. Some of some of them were hers. Others were a photograph that she collected in her travels. But 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 muir. He was emerged at this time as the figurehead of the us Conservation Movement and allies, was right in there writing about it. She wrote a couple of very influential articles on wilderness preservation. She was an activist in helping to have mt. 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 realized, or i came to find out that a number of scholars credit her as one of a handful full of western traveler writers authors who opened try 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, you know, 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, 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 packing. So this was a woman who was just so on top of things. So so the the part about china ended up having to be a whole chapter because there was just so much there. So she astounded me as, as i think you can tell. And it ended up taking me ten years to write her story and part of that was the constant discovery and i know that this book is only the beginning of her story. Its very heavily footnote i did because i felt an obligation to document my sources because other scholars and researchers can now take those sources and take the story further. There are lots of questions, of course, that i cant answer about her and the one that always comes up. Did she have any romantic relationship . So and i cant answer that. I dont. I suspect not. I think she was a spinster her. 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 really gotten kind of muddied over the years because its a complicated story. There were many people involved. It happened over many years. That were 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 to 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 that Eliza Scidmore journalistic career was very heavy, influential in shaping her vision of the trees as we know