Transcripts For CSPAN2 Diana 20240706 : vimarsana.com

My name is wendy wasserman, marketing director at politics and prose. We are here to talk about Eliza Scidmore with diana parsell. Im curious how many have gone to see the Cherry Blossoms . How many got caught in the traffic . That was bananas, wasnt it . They are glorious, but the secret is in the neighborhoods. Thats the secret but thanks to Eliza Scidmore we have them. Before we get to the meat of the evening, i want to do some housekeeping. This is when i tell you to turn off your phones, nothing ringing or blaring or doing those things. We are happy about having cspan here, Live Streaming on youtube. I am also, some other housekeeping things. If you like what you here tonight and we know you do and happy you are here in the store, we have events every night so we have a sheet sheet of a calendar here. It is womens History Month even though we are towards the end of it and a few other housekeeping things. What will happen here, i will introduce diana for a few minutes. She is a 1woman show tonight which is remarkable. She will talk for 20 or 30 minutes and tell you what you need to know about this woman you didnt know anything about. The book. Afterwords, theres going to be, if you have any questions, a microphone behind the pillar, we ask you to come up here and ask your questions for the microphone for a couple reasons and so diana can hear them and so they are captured on video and audio. The most important thing is you have to purchase the book. After we do the q and a, diana will cover it so that is pretty cool. This is one of the few in person events she is doing. Get it while you can. Im excited about the Cherry Blossom festival. For some reason this year felt more Cherry Blossomy than this year so i dont know what it is. I know that 111 years ago today, first Lady Nellie Taft and the japanese ambassador of the time, a small official delegation, with their shovels, doing the digging and planting the cherry trees that we see varieties and thats the beginning of what became the famous cherry tree grove. And her one of her book, Eliza Scidmore, the name on everybodys official washington thing but we dont know her now. She was everywhere in the gilded age. In alaska, china, japan, and you call her forest gump. She was prolific beyond belief and publishing every day in newspapers and magazines and also helped with National Geographic and other things. I dont understand how she did it then and or how we dont know more about her now. So diana herself is a former journalist. It was another tie to that. She was at the National Institutes of health. We are happy to have her tonight. [applause] its a delight to be here. Politics and prose, quite honored to be invited to be there tonight. Wendy wasserman stall my introduction. Today is a special day because it was 111 years ago today with a batch of 3000 trees that were donated from japan. I will tell you that story a little bit. I want to again reiterate what she tells you about Eliza Scidmore. This is the most amazing woman you never heard of. And why, if we have read so much, you havent read it but ive been living with it for 10 years, why havent we know more about her . She was a critical figure in bringing the cherry trees to washington and had a remarkable career apart from that and essentially disappeared for a century. Why has that happened. How did i discover her . It wasnt here in washington. I was working in indonesia and i bought a book, a reprint of an 1897 travelogue called job are the garden of the east. By someone named er skidmore. I was impressed how it held up. A lot of things i read, i had seen myself. The descriptions were very vivid. It was informed and i found the voice quite engaging and so i naturally wondered, who was this guy and what took him to java 100 years ago . 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 Scidmore, 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 person who introduced the idea of bringing cherry trees to washington. How i never heard of this woman . I had lived here over 30 years, went to see the trees every year and never heard the name Eliza Scidmore. I was naturally curious. I was curious, what inspired her, how did that come about but it was also her story as a woman that intrigued me. How did a woman of her era manage 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 about, didnt know if it would be enough, i had never written a book but it was her story i got deeper and deeper into. I was astonished at the amount of information i found. At first it was slow going. I went to the library of congress. Didnt find a lot. She appeared in biographical indexes, a dozen the told me she was an important person in her day. I found copies of her 7 books, the original copies. I found a handful of her journalism but nothing on her personal life and no biography. I started simply piecing clues together and following them seeing where they would take me and spent a couple years in the library of congress and just digging, i didnt find a lot but had a huge breakthrough. One day i was a couple 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, her middle name and paternal grandmothers name, a biblical name. Once i started searching, i found a flood of material. In the end, i uncovered almost 800 newspaper and magazine articles she wrote in her lifetime. There were two things in particular that really 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. This was well before women started going to work for newspapers in the 1880s, when they began to be hired in significant numbers. Its interesting to find there was a very vibrant group of women correspondents in washington dc during the gilded age. After the civil war the newspapers were trying to attract more readers. One of the things they were doing was running more womens news, but they also wanted women correspondents. You know from the gilded age that that was significant in washington. A lot of entertaining and we had all these millionaire politicians trying to outdo one another so the entertaining was lavish and editors felt we had women who can describe the cut of a ball gown and who knew these intricate social protocols of entertaining in washington. There were a couple dozen women in washington writing for newspapers around the country. In boston, philadelphia, new york, they were from sacramento, albany, syracuse so a couple dozen of them, actually credentialed to the press galleries on capitol hill. This was stunning to me because i never heard any of this. It was an incredible story of washington history weve not heard much about. The interesting thing about eliza was she got a job working as a Society Columnist for newspaper in st. Louis. She wrote for them for ten years but she did something a little different because the society sees enraged from december 1st when congress started meeting until lent. Thats when the social season occurred but come summer everybody left town, people with money went to their homes, Country Homes and resorts so what eliza did, she started traveling. She crisscrossed the country several times, she would report on destinations of the most americans 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. It is an indication of her enterprise and her hard work ethic. In one of these trips, she went to alaska in 1883. Alaska had only been part of the United States for 16 years. They knew nothing about alaska. Eliza was inspired by john muir who had interesting glaciers on 18791880, two trips to alaska to study glaciers. In a canoe with the assistance of half a dozen native americans, native alaskans and eliza read about his travels and decides shes going to alaska on our mail steamer, that was the only way to get to alaska in those days, to take a male steamer and go to the thousand mile passage that takes you through puget sound to the alaska panhandle and that journey turned out to be historic. The captain of the ship, decided to take her the tour and that detour was in glacier bay. Never carried tourists into glacier bay and she was one of the first people to set sites on the glacier. It was later named for john mueller. Other than him, she went back the following summer and turned her dispatches to the first travelogue on alaska. That was in 1885 and she went on to write about alaska for 15 years, a comprehensive book for together, with these books, she and you were the people that really promoted tourism to alaska for the first time in the 90s of this was part of her legacy had a big one. Okay. Now we get to the next milestone. She goes he goes to japan in 1885. The same year her alaska book came out. Why japan . She had a brother in the consular service, spent most of his 39 year career in asia and most of that time in japan. Summer of 1885, eliza and her mother went to visit george in japan and it became lifechanging for both of them. So mrs. Sid more skidmore decides to live there, this gives eliza a parttime home in japan. She started writing about japan, she wrote a very influential book on japan 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. Despite having a parttime home in japan, she had a base for traveling around larger asia. She ended up writing books on java, japan, china, india. She wrote for many major magazines of the day. She had an extraordinary record. One of the fun things in the book, some of these episodes where she suddenly turns up, like in the philippines after the spanishamerican war in 1899, and the day she arrives there is an insurrection and it is like this cant be true, because i keep reading these things. That is why i cared compared the forrest gump of her day, she rubbed elbows with lots of famous people and she was eyewitness to many historic events. She became an expert on japan. That is where she got the idea for the cherry tree. A couple other things about her. She became, as i artie mentioned, the first woman elected to the board of National Geographic. In 1888, she joined in 1890. They were impressed by her reporting, pioneering reporting on alaska. The secretary of the society which made her the first woman ever to serve on the board. She took up photography, kodak had just invented the box camera in 1888. The first evidence i found was her in 1890 on a trip to alaska taking photographs of john mueller at his cabin. Not only did she photograph mueller but developed a friendship, went for months and stayed in his cabin with a group of friends. This woman didnt waste any opportunities. She went on to write a dozen articles and contributed many photographs over the years. Somewhere hers, some were photographs she collected in her travels. She was the most important female figure in the history of National Geographic. She became an activist in the early Conservation Movement. This grew out of her relationship with john muir who was emerging as the figurehead of the us Conservation Movement and eliza was 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. I came to find out, a number of scholars credit her with a handful of western traveler writers who opened china to mass tourism at the end of the 19th century. I knew she wrote a book on china and i could wrap that up in a page and 1 2 but as we started finding these letters shes writing to her editor, it was amazing. She went to china a dozen times and had her finger on the pulse of all kinds of turmoil happening in china at the time. She wrote her book on china and it was published the summer of 1900, at the same time the boxer rebellion was happening. This was a woman who was just fell on top of things so the part about china ended up being a whole chapter because there was so much of their. She astounded me as i think you can tell. It ended up taking me ten years to write her story. Part of that was constant discovery. This was the beginning of her story. It is heavily footnoted because i felt an obligation to document my sources because other scholars and researchers can take those sources and take the story further. There are lots of questions i cant answer and the one that always comes up, did she have any romantic relationships . I cant answer that. I suspect not. I think she was a spinster but i look forward to somebody coming up with more enlightening answers to that question. Her involvement in the cherry tree. How did that come about . The story has gotten muddied over the years because its a complicated story. There were many people involved. It happened over many years. More than one batch of trees if you know about the history. It has been confusing over the years. Part of what i was trying to do in the book was to sort out those events based on Available Evidence to find out the origin of the cherry trees. One of the interesting things i discovered is that Eliza Scidmores journalistic career was very influential in shaping her vision of the trees as we know them today. I told you she went to japan in 1885 for the first time. It was sometime in the 1880s that she got this idea that washington should have some cherry trees. 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, what better place than the Nations Capital which had a 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 came upon one of her columns and it was published in november of 1883 and this was before she had ever gone to japan. She describes to readers in st. Louis, she went to the National Mall to report on this new project the army corps of engineers had just started to turn this swampy area down by the Washington Monument into a public part. It was a big wasteland, the Potomac River would come to the base of the Washington Monument. 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 went to the National Mall in november 18, 83. 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 top. It was a platform elevator that had a cage, an open sided cage with boules that would swing out and drop these stones into place. She rides this to the top and describes that. She gets the top and later looks down and she sees this area that is just the beginning. She said in her column, one day this is going to be the largest, most beautiful park in the city, a place of magnificence in future administrations. This tells us that by the time she went to japan she already had in the back of her mind, an idea of a place in washington that would be perfect for a park of cherry trees. That forced me to rewrite the structure of my book. The last third of the book will be about the cherry trees, but this pushes the story because we begin to see the evolution of the vision. She came back to washington, goes to the men in charge of the park, the army corps of engineers and suggests they should plant cherry trees along the potomac and they listen to her, they heard her out and ignored her. These were army corps of engineers officials, they had been trained at west point, they were very conventional. Their ideas of what the landscaping should be for a public park and it didnt include cherry trees. They were exotic. So she kept at it and tried at least three times over a period of 20 years, the break came in 1909 when mrs. Taft came to the white house. Helen taft and William Howard taft were very interested in the development of potomac park. The land had been filled in and they started 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, missus taft who was trained as a musician decided she was going to build a bandstand out along the river and it would be a place for public concerts and people from all walks of life around the city could enjoy the music. This sounds a lot like what eliza had been proposing in terms of creating a Cherry Tree Park along the river. What she heard, she sent a note seeking her encouragement to include cherry trees and helen taft, who had lived in japan it had an appreciation of Japanese Culture jumped on the idea. Suddenly these two women are partners in this project. It was very exciting for me to find some documents in my research that i hadnt seen published anywhere else that told me, Eliza Scidmore was the intermediary between missus taft and the japanese who eventually offered to donate several thousand trees to the project. There were letters of that showed where eliza is writing to the japanese consul, i just came from a meeting at the white house with missus taft, she would love to accept your offer of these treats so of course if you know the story you know the first batch of trees came, they were found to be infested, 2000 trees and they ended up destroying the entire they were burned on the grounds of the Washington Monument where the usda had storehouses but the japanese were gracious, they came back and said that we will send a replacement batch, grown under pristine conditions, took a year and 1 2, so finality in the spring of 1912, this replacement batch of trees arrived in washington and as wendy already told you, march 27, 111 years ago today, helen taft organized a little dedication ceremony for the planting of the first of those trees, invited the japanese ambassador and his wife and Eliza Scidmore so she was in her 50s when she saw a realization of the dream she had at the time for almost 30 years. Thats giving you the basics. We want to have time for questions. Im not going to do a reading from the book, but i hope you enjoy the book. She was an amazing person. The constant process of discovery, to keep finding things out about her and couldnt wait to learn more once people now have the beginnings of the record, documents that lead us into Greater Knowledge about her. So thank you. [applause] thanks for that thought. I am 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 attitudes from the west. To what extent did she buy into those or pushback against those . Guest she was a humanitarian, a lot of the writings, that he also was a product of her day. She did also at times have the same imperialistic attitudes that the west was superior and so i do address that. She uses some language, and attitudes. And there are situations, the you can see, and she was very much humanitarian. And early in her career, and was appalled by that. She was appalled at the conditions in china. The distinction, one of the big distinctions, she was quite inegalitarian, and in many cases was really appalled by the institutions in china that were holding the people back. It was in a believer in human advancement. And it was not a clearcut attitude. The first statement of trees, do you have any correspondence or editorials written by her, how that went over on both sides . Guest i dont have so much from her but i did read all the correspondence with the state department on both sides, the japanese and americans and the Us Department of agriculture, they have to be destroyed and have to be a threat to us agriculture. It went back and forth, the japanese were very gracious and said we understand the need to do this. We wouldnt have wanted to create any problems. We know its difficult but we appreciate the situation. It is great to be part of this combination of a decade of work, members of the womens history roundtable and people talking about women who need to be discovered and the extent to which you are comfortable, when you first explored this topic it was pitch to the 100th anniversary, as you dug in, you found many more things interesting about this moment, commenting on your Research Process and trying to get this book published people might be interested. Guest sarah and i, started researching, why are these records so scared . These women who are experienced in womens studies said throughout history womens lives were fought, not worthy of being documented and they said a lot of womens history turns up in the papers of the men in their lives. It will be filed away in a file photo that says either material. This happened in my case. I ended up finding records about her, 2 dozen institutions. So a lot were overlooked. The Research Methods have changed over the years, more digitized, people think you can find it all on the internet and that is so wrong. What the internet can do is give you an index to collections here or there and you can use search techniques to begin to find records, or newspaper records, she had written to this newspaper a hundred years ago, those newspaper records existed but they were not coming up in my search until i found them in databases at the library of congress. It was a collection of techniques but this is a huge, huge problem in researching womens lives. Congratulations on that. One question is David Fairchild. How this fits into the cherry tree journey. David fairchild always comes up because David Fairchild was a boston a step the department of agriculture. He made his name by becoming a plant explorer. What this meant was he would travel around the world looking good for a new and nonnative varieties of species of plants that could be imported to the United States to expand the agricultural crops and horticultural crops. David fairchild, he knew eliza by the way. He had gone to java a year after she did and wrote a book about that time in 1897, he admired her as a person very knowledgeable on plants and he even at his office arranged to have her appointed an official collaborator in the collection of plants specimens from china and japan. As as he wrote in the letter i saw to his boss, he said nobody, nobody knows more people in china and japan than miss scidmore. But he in one of his trips in 1902 or so, independently discover japanese cherry trees and he was taken with them as well so he began independently studying them, brought them to his home in chevy chase, he had 100 or so important to study the man to see to see how they would do in the washington area. Eliza and fairchild became allies. He organized a Publicity Campaign in 1908 to try to bring the cherry trees to washington. They both pursued this idea at the same time. I found evidence that they wrote to eliza wrote to missus taft, David Fairchild sent a letter to the army corps of engineers, for two weeks. Mrs. Taft jumped into the project and runs with it. It was interesting and i dont know if they were acting in concert or if they were acting in competition. That is an openended question. Thats how i had to leave it in the book, this is the David Fairchild situation. It seems from the record over the years, there might have been a little bit of bad blood over the years because neither of them referred much to the others contribution. Speculating there but thats my take on it. Thank you. On behalf of those of us who come from the Tourism Industry i cant tell you how exciting it is to have a book about eliza. We talk about her as much as we can but this is so great. I am curious if as the traveler that she was there was comment about her trips to asia did you find evidence of her traveling to latin america or africa . I did not. She went to europe. She became quite an art collector, collector of asian art and she ended up having a collection of 250 pieces and some were pretty valuable and were sold at auction late in life. She went to europe a number of times and early in her career i have evidence she went to europe several times later in her life she went to europe. She, it turned out, was our ninth generation american. Her ancestors in england, back to the scidmores in the eleventh century. There is a manor house in england that is still it is no longer in the family but it was until not long ago, theres a picture of it i was excited to find that i included in the book. Late in life, she went back to england after the war, she did little bit of reported, she reported from several wars but not as a war correspondent but an observer, the russo japanese war, the sino japanese war. She was in washington during the civil war, the spanishamerican war, shes in the philippines, and world war i. She was still reporting during world war i and she reported on the relief efforts in europe so she goes to europe late in life and moves to europe late in life. Part of this came from there was an act passed in 1924 that excluded the japanese from being allowed citizenry in the United States, this exclusion act. She was considered a friend of japan. The emperor of japan gave her a medal, the highest civilian metal for her favorable reporting and because she was considered a friend of japan. She went to europe and move to geneva, switzerland, a fan of the league of nations, she died in europe in 1928 and her ashes were carried to yokohama where her mother and brother were buried. This is part of the reason she has disappeared. And she was the one who introduced the id, but then it got her whole history got overlooked for a century. Other questions . All right. It seems so unusual during that timeframe, for there to be a single woman traveling. Did you encounter any evidence of resistance to that . Guest i didnt find evidence of resistance. In her travels, she will mention my friend and i or whatever, she never identifies who she is traveling with. There are times when it is clear that she is traveling with her mother or other times traveling with friends which there is, there were episodes later in her life when it was clear she was traveling on her own with the local native, and one where she got so annoyed with him she sent him home, it was one of her trips to china because she found him so annoying but she would hire interpreters and she would hire people to accompany her so i think it was a little bit of both but it was unusual for women to travel alone as the younger women but later in her life, she was very established authoritative person and it was less unusual but she did have help wherever she traveled. I cant tell you that she spoke the japanese language. She had assistance and her brother being in japan meant she had access to these diplomatic privileges. If shes collecting our chickens ship at home a lot cheaper than you or i could have at the time. This helps explain some of the situations that enabled her to travel places that a lot of people in japan would not have gone to. I chuckled, and secretary of the National Geographic board, traditional role for a woman, did you come across any tension in terms of that . I didnt. We can say it was because she was a woman but she was a good writer, what better person to elect as secretary of the organization. She was also quite a gogetter. And a defender, there was an incident in the book where it has to do with National Geographic sends the very First Expedition to alaska so she gets wind of this and these guys come back from this expedition and are trying to ascertain whether it is the highest peak in north america and they come back and they are going back to washington to report their findings. One of the guys in this group, one of the people in the expedition, he kind of blows the cover. Instead of waiting to report those events he starts blabbing to the press in california and it is all over the newspapers about this young typographer who is getting all the credit instead of the scientists who led the expedition, shes furious about this and is writing in her column, there should be respect among scientific organizations as much as there are between people so shes nailing this guy in her column so she is defending at and the scientist whose honor she was defending, because of her friends had 80, need to interview scientists and they did and a column and 1 2 come out in newspapers around the country giving credit to the actual scientists who led the expedition. People shes this great defender of the geographic. It is clear this is a woman who gets things done. When you think of an organization like that that depends on volunteers, shes the right person at the right time so she became a very important person over the years. I cant even tell you. Can you expound a little bit on her involvement with National Geographic and the Photography Department and wasnt she also involved in the creation of the yellow logo . I havent heard that but she has this relationship with National Geographic for over 20 years, 25 years but she doesnt really start she did write a few things about alaska or them before the turnofthecentury but her most of her work with the geographic came after the early 1900s and one of the reasons for that, they got a new editor and he changed the format. 1905, the National Geographic was a pretty scientific journal, could be really boring. People that were putting it out were scientists, geologists, writing these boring articles so Alexander Graham bell said weve got to change this magazine. If we are going to attract people to become the best of the geographic, we have to do something about this lousy magazine and he believed in pictures. Weve got to have pictures. Pictures make people excited. His son in law becomes the editor and introduces in 1905 by accident the pictorial format. He finds hes got this issue coming out and has 11 blank pages. You have a package of photographs that come across his desk, amazing photographs from tibet. He runs 11 photographs on tibet, each a full page, this was never done before and people were so excited that the magazine just took off overnight and the membership just soared overnight. Gilbert grosvenor cut this formula. For the next century. Hes got to fill these, traveling in japan, he was looking for photographs and took a lot of photographs for the magazine, but what i found, her legacy as she acquired photographs from different sources. This packet of 15, i love them, i want more and heres a packet of 90 and she was having some of these hand colored. This is the period when National Geographic started running color photography. You got to start running them in, you are wasting this opportunity and it took a while because of the technology of the cost but they did so she was really right in there working closely with him and that is her legacy. A lot of history in this book. So many stories, i ended up having 20 chapters and im not going to cover that will cover that in passing. Than her then her correspondence ended up a couple of letters at the geographic but the real valuable records were 160 letters she wrote to her editor in new york city at century magazine and she became a writer for century magazine. It was considered a top magazine of its day, but think magazine everybody read from president s on down. She was one of the leading writers and that is where she published a lot. Her letters to the editor at the new york public library, they were fun to read because she is opinionated. And it was a really important source in this book. She looks formidable. Did she have a sense of humor . What kind of personality . He had a sense of humor. She was precocious from childhood. She grew up in washington. Came to washington as a child, spent her early years in wisconsin. Wonderful gossip in the book where her moms story being quite interesting, mom had three marriages and two were failed marriages, including a divorce in 1838. When i found evidence of this divorce, it was so amazing because there was something questionable about this marriage. The third marriage is the marriage to elizas father. When that fell through, mom comes to dc, eliza grows up here, shes raised by a single mother, she and her mother in dc, ran a boardinghouse and she got a job at the us treasury. So eliza went to georgetown for a couple years and then she went to oberlin for a while and didnt graduate but she was so precocious that when she went to georgetown, she was only there, i can only find it for a couple years, she might have gone longer but the first year she went there were records that showed that she got high marks, she got prizes for reading and spelling, geography, she told an interviewer late in life that as a child, she loved playing with a glow but. I was always planning journeys, she said. So this was something that interested her, this idea of the world from a very young age but you can see in many of these letters i have referred to that she is witty and she had a tendency to dramatize things and to exaggerate things, but i think she mustve been fun to hang out with because she seemed to have friends everywhere she went. That was the thing about her, she had friends in high places and she would be off traveling under what we would consider extraordinarily primitive conditions. She had this ability to ease her way between different worlds. She seems to have been a very likable person. There was a moving letter where her friends are saying i cant believe that we have lost this wonderful, sunny, optimistic you can see comments like that in various correspondence the tell you how this was. She was probably taking a lot of time because she was a very strong woman. She was a likable person. It was curious today. She was persuading the army guys at the title basin, there were a lot of bought tentacle concerns about trees surviving in the dc climate. Where did she get her knowledge of botany . Guest she traveled in japan and wrote about botany. A different bot and a topic. She wrote about japanese gardens. She wrote a very definitive article in century magazine about cherry trees. When it became clear washington was going to get cherry trees she will wrote the most important article that had been published at that point because americans knew nothing about cherry trees. This was full of history about cherry trees and what talented gardeners the japanese were. She called them wizards, necromancers. They were wizards who could take something in nature and transform it. But she picked up her knowledge over the years. The fact that David Fairchild was impressed with her knowledge of plants is an indication. It was research. She was curious and found out things which became quite clear and whatever she wrote, she studied at to death. She picked up an interesting japanese morning glory. She starts growing them at their house in japan and she ends up writing a 35 page scientific paper that she delivered to the Japan Society in london and was published in this journal. So that goes to show she was like a dog. She would chew on this bone and keypad something which tells us about her persistence in not quitting that idea on the cherry tree. Thank you all. Thank you all for coming. [applause] this evening, President Biden addresses the country following the passage of the debt ceiling and federal spending agreement last night in the senate. Live coverage from the oval Office Begins at 7 00 pm eastern on cspan. You can watch online, cspan. Org or with the free video apps, cspan now. Order your copy of the 118th congressional directory on cspanshop. Org, your access to the federal government with Contact Information for every house and Senate Member and to. Information on congressional committees, the president s cabinet, federal agencies and state governors. At 9 p. M. Eastern tom hanks act or an executive producer of the animated short film how to rig an election, the racist history of the 1876 president ial contest talks about the controversial race between candidates rutherford b. Hayes and samuel tilden. Exploring the american story, watch American History tv saturdays on cspan2 and find a fullchule on your Program Guide or watch onle anytime that cspan. Org history. Weekends on cspan2 on intellectual feast. Every saturday American History tv documents americas stories, and on sunys booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan2 comes from these Television Companies and more including comcast. Are you thinking this is just a Community Center . Comcast is partnering with 1000 dissenters to crate wifi in the lift zones so students from lowincome families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. Comcast along with these Television Companies supports cspan2 as a public service. The last class, we picked up where we left off with reconstruction. Everybody remember that . We started talking about it after 1865 so we start with the en