>> Elizabeth Novara:
I'm Elizabeth Novara,
and I'm a historian who
specializes in women's history
here at the library in the
Manuscript Division.
I co-curated the library's
Shall Not Be Denied: Women
Fight for the Vote Exhibition
during the 2019, 2020
Women's Suffrage Centennial.
And joining me in hosting
the discussion today is
my colleague Mari Nakahara.
She's a curator in the library's
Prints and Photographs Division.
Mari, did you want to say
something more about yourself?
>> Mari Nakahara:
Sure. Hi again.
My name is Mari Nakahara,
curator at the Prints
and Photographs Division
at the Library of Congress.
My involvement to the
"Cherry Blossom"
started in 2012, when we
celebrate the 100th anniversary
of the Cherry Blossom Tree Gift.
We have great resources not
limited to P and P, but also
all over the library. In 2020,
my colleague Catherine Bullard
and I published this book and
Diana was the one of
the fact-check reviewers.
So since then, we have known
Diana very well and we admire
and respect her knowledge.
So I look forward
to today's talk.
Thank you.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
Thanks so much, Mari.
So our guest speaker today,
I'm happy to introduce,
is Diana P. Parsell.
She is a Washington area
writer and former journalist.
And for her new book on
19th century journalist,
Eliza Scidmore, she received a
Mayborn Fellowship in Biography
and the Hazel Raleigh Prize from
Biographers' International
Organization.
And her author website
is here on this slide,
and you should also see it in
the chat as well if you would
like more information.
So thank you, Diana, for
being with us today for this
conversation about your
biography of Eliza Scidmore.
I'm going to turn things
over to you now to give us a
broad overview of your book.
And after that presentation,
we'll delve into greater detail
with a conversation, and then
after that, we'll open up for
questions from the audience.
So I'm happy to
turn it over to you.
>> Diana P. Parsell: Thank you.
Really appreciate being here.
It's a great labor
of love, this book.
I did not know when I started
out much about Eliza Scidmore.
I was stunned that so little
had been known about her,
given her legacy
certainly on the cherry trees.
But when I started
researching her life,
I used the Library of Congress
as a home base.
I happen to live outside of
Washington, so it was really
wonderful to be able to
use the Library of Congress's
resources, kind
of at my back door.
And I knew about
the cherry trees.
I think most people that know
about Eliza know her story,
mainly through her role in
bringing the cherry trees to
Washington, her and in
partnership with First Lady
Helen Taft and others.
But the real big surprise
to me turned out to be
Eliza Scidmore's incredible
record as a journalist.
She was a journalist
for over 40 years.
She had an amazing,
record of achievement in that.
And so I realized that,
really the journalism was
the true heart of her story.
And so a lot of my
book focuses on that.
And really, journalism was the
gateway to most of the other
achievements that she's
recognized for.
So, briefly, who was she?
Where did she come from?
She was born in
the Midwest in 1856.
But her story, for our
purposes, really begins in,
in during the Civil War when
she, at the age of five, came to
Washington with her mother and
her brother. She was raised
by her mother, who was a
middle class working woman.
She took in boarders
to support the family.
And she, also got a job at the
Treasury Department, which
was the first agency to
begin hiring, one of the
first, to begin hiring women
during the Civil War.
It was, very important
for Eliza growing up in D.C.,
because she closely
followed current events.
She came to know many
influential people.
And also, importantly, given
the later Cherry Blossom story,
she followed the physical
development of Washington over
many decades as a journalist.
From a very young age,
she showed an
intellectual curiosity.
I found school records
here in Washington.
She attended an elite school for--
girls' school for
at least the first few
years of her career.
I mean, her education.
And at the end of the first
grade, I found records showing
that she won two prizes.
And one of those
was in geography.
So she told an interviewer
later in life that maps
and glow-- a glow were her
favorite playthings.
As a child that she loved
making up journeys and, her
daydreams, she said, were
always of other countries.
So here we're already beginning
to see the seeds of who
this child will
grow up to become.
So here we see her
as a young reporter.
She made her reporting debut
in 1876 at the age of 19.
And that happened when she went
in May of 1876 to Philadelphia
to cover the Centennial
Exposition, which those of you
who know American history know
was essentially America's first
World's Fair, a huge, a huge
event, exposition that
was held at the 100th
anniversary of American
independence. So Eliza was
there for the first week.
She, she filed five articles
which will tell you just how
fluent a writer she was.
I found those articles in
the Library of Congress's
Chronicling America directory
of digitized papers.
So-- here I'm beginning to
see the start of her
journalism record, although it
took me, frankly, several years
to uncover the extent
of her journalism record.
So after the fair,
after the exposition,
she came to Washington and she
started working as a society
writer for a newspaper in Saint
Louis, the Globe-Democrat.
A lot of this was a surprising
element in the story, because I
discovered that there were
actually quite a few women who
were working as freelance
newspaper correspondents in
Washington after the Civil War.
Many more than I think
any of us realize.
And some of them were even
credentialed to the press
galleries on Capitol Hill.
So Eliza wrote for this
newspaper in Saint Louis.
She filed three articles a week,
but she did something a little
different from her colleagues
because during the off season,
when the social season was on
hold for the summer, she started
traveling around the country
and she started reporting on
places that were of
interest to Americans and
which most of them, of course,
would probably never see
in their lifetime.
So she did quite well as a
young journalist by combining
society reporting and
travel writing.
She apparently made a very good
income because I found a record
from one of her colleagues in
Washington admiring how she
made more money than some of
the men in Washington who
were working as reporters.
So, a big event occurred as
an outcome of this, the first
big milestone
in her reporting career.
Next slide, please.
Came in the summer of 1883
when she went to Alaska
for the first time.
Now, Alaska had only been
part of the United States for
16 years, so it was still
a frontier territory.
Eliza herself was inspired
by the writings of John Muir.
He had made two trips to Alaska
to study glaciers, and he wrote
about those. So she
follows in his footsteps.
So she went to Alaska in the
summer of 1883 and reported on
it for the newspaper.
And then she repeated her trip
the following summer.
So she combined the newspaper
dispatches from those two trips
into what is now considered the
first travel guide to Alaska.
She later wrote a more
comprehensive guidebook, and she
reported on Alaska
over 15 years.
She made about a half a dozen
trips, according to my records.
And together, the writings
of her and John Muir are
considered very, very
influential in helping to spur
the rise of Alaska
tourism in the 1890s.
Next slide, please.
This is one of my favorite
findings at the library.
If you cut this in half and
you see this strip on the left,
I found this as a physical fold-
out map in the second book that
Eliza published
on Alaska in 1893.
And what that shows is the
actual route of the Alaska
steamers that went up and down
to Alaska along the inside
passage. So there you see
it at the base starting in
Puget Sound. I found reports
that she got on the ship for the
first time in Oregon,
in Portland.
And then she went up the coast
1000 miles up into Glacier Bay
and then back down, which-- a
journey that took about a month.
So this was a really exciting,
really exciting to find this
in physical form.
When I opened the back of her
book and here was a little
envelope, a flap that had this
fold-out map in it, which was
around, I think seven inches
by 22 inches or something.
It was pretty exciting.
So anyway, based on her
travels in Alaska, she struck up
a friendship with
Muir and his wife.
She visited them at their home
in California, and she became an
ally with Muir when
he started, taking up
wilderness protection as part of
the U.S. conservation movement.
She wrote a number of
articles related to that.
Her Alaska writings also led
to her 25-year affiliation with
National Geographic, because
the scientists there were very
impressed with her
Alaska exploration.
And in 1892, two years after
she joined the organization,
they elected her corresponding
secretary, which made her the
first woman to serve on
its board of managers.
So she went on to become a--,
an associate editor.
Also, she contributed about a
dozen articles to the magazine
and quite a number of
photographs, some taken by her
and many, many photographs
taken by others as well.
So she became the most
important woman in the
National Geographic's
early history.
So next, the next big milestone
in her journalistic
career came in 1885.
So that summer, she and her
mother went to Japan to
visit her brother, George.
George had become a U.S.
consular officer, and he spent
most of his 39-year
career in Japan.
Well, this-- Mrs. Scidmore decided to
stay on and to
live with her son.
And this gave then Eliza
a part-time home in Japan.
So she came and went often.
She acquired a deep knowledge
of Japanese culture and history,
and she published many articles
on Japan and a very popular
book, which today is
considered sort of a landmark
book in historic
travel literature.
So she gained a reputation as
one of America's best informed
experts on Japan.
But this home in Japan also
served other purposes because it
gave her a base for reporting
from across the Far East.
So next slide, please.
Here you see the list of the
books she published.
Books on Java, China, India.
This third one, 1891,
it says CPR guide.
This was the Canadian
Pacific Railway.
She wrote a travel guide for
them, and in return, they helped
subsidize a good bit of her
travel in the Far East.
The last one on the list, 1907,
is, "As the Hague Ordains,"
this is the only work
of fiction she wrote.
It's a novel that is based
on her reporting in Japan
during the Russo-Japanese War,
when she went to several camps
and did interviews
of prisoners of Russian
prisoners of war who were,
in camps in Japan.
So I was able to actually see,
you know, able to review these
books at the Library of
Congress, which was, which was a
wonderful start to my research,
because, as I said earlier,
there was very little at first
that I found out about her, but
it was also fun to find
handwritten, copyright
registrations of these books
in the, in the library's
copyright registries.
And also there were
a couple of old wooden card
catalogs, and I found those
little index cards in the card
catalogs that had titles of her
books, written by hand and
and stored there.
So, now I'm going to tell you
a little bit about the
cherry trees. This story has
been told quite a few times,
and I did find,
next slide, please.
I did find some, new
records that show how
influential Eliza's role
was in that because she not only
came up with that idea to
begin with, but it turns out I
discovered she was an important
intermediary in bringing
those trees to Washington by,
mediating the donation of
the trees from Japan.
So she got the idea for bringing
cherry trees to Washington
while she was in
Japan, of course.
And she loved, she thought,
Japanese cherry trees,
she called them the most
beautiful thing in the world.
She loved this ritual, this
ancient tradition in Japan
called hanami.
And this is when, you know,
everybody in the country comes
out and strolls under the trees
when they're in bloom.
So she said, "These
trees are so beautiful.
Why don't we have
them in America?
Why don't we have these
in parks and cities?"
And, by the way, what better
place to do that to introduce
Americans to these
than Washington, D.C.?
Tourism was on the rise.
Spring tourism was becoming
very popular in Washington.
So she thought there's a great
opportunity and she had a spot
in mind. Next slide, please.
Here you see, in 1877, before
Eliza ever went to Japan,
the unfinished
Washington Monument,
looking across the mall from
Capitol Hill and behind the
Washington Monument, which is
actually west and south of it,
you see that, that vast body
that looks like the river.
Well, it was very shallow
ground, a very marshy
ground. When the tide came in,
it flowed almost to the base of
the monument. And then when
it flowed out, it left a very
mucky, marshy field.
And this was a kind of
a nasty part of town.
It smelled. It had
sewage runoff.
It had rotting vegetation.
And so for years,
people, residents, urged
that this part of town be
cleaned up. So in the 1880s,
the Army Corps of Engineers
started filling in that land.
They used, they used soil dredged
from the bottom of the
Potomac, and they
filled in that grand.
I'm sorry, filled in that
land with the intention of
turning that reclaimed
ground into a public park.
Well, Eliza Scidmore knew
this because she followed this
project as a reporter
in Washington.
And she said, "This is one day
going to be the largest and most
beautiful park in Washington,"
as she wrote in her column.
And the St. Louis
Globe-Democrat, she told
people "It's going to one day be
a place of magnificence in
future administrations."
And by this time, she
hadn't even gone to Japan.
But we know now that, she
had this in mind when she came
up with the idea of bringing
cherry trees to D.C.
Next slide, please.
So here you see the
new Potomac Park.
This is Potomac Drive.
It was known as the Speedway.
People liked going there.
You know, obviously for
automobile rides and all.
So this is just before
Washington actually got its
cherry trees.
So, Eliza, starting around
the late 1880s, started
pitching the idea of bringing
trees to Washington.
She approached the men who were
in charge of the city parks, but
they weren't interested.
They heard her out, and then
they ignored the suggestion.
So this went on, 2 or 3
times, for a period of
20 years. And then finally
there was a breakthrough. Next.
Eliza found an
ally in Mrs. Taft.
Also, there was a USDA
botanist named David Fairchild.
He took an interest in it.
He and his wife started joining
Eliza in advocating for bringing
the trees to Washington.
But the breakthrough came
when the Tafts came to the
White House in 1909.
Mrs. Taft had--
Both the Tafts
were very interested
in the development
of Potomac Park
as a, you know, as an
important, amenity for the
residents of D.C.,
but Mrs. Taft in particular,
who was a musician, wanted to
build a bandstand there
as a public gathering place
down along the river.
Well, when the--, when word of that got out,
Eliza Scidmore
sent a note to Mrs. Taft
urging her to support the
planting of cherry trees
down along the river.
And Mrs. Taft loved the idea.
She took it up. And from
that point on, she really--
She was the force that was
needed to make that happen.
Eliza, as I mentioned,
mediated the eventual donation
of trees from Japan.
She knew this Japanese
chemist, Jokichi Takamine.
He was a wealthy chemist
living in New York City.
And when Eliza told him
about Mrs. Taft's plans,
he immediately offered
to donate 2000 trees.
So those trees were eventually
given in the name of Japan
to the people of Washington.
And they arrived in 1910.
But, unfortunately, as some
of you may know, they did
an inspection of those trees
and they discovered they were
badly infested with
quite a variety of insects.
So in order to-- the USDA
said in order to protect U.S.
agriculture, we
must destroy them.
And they were, all 2000 of those
trees, were then burned.
So next slide, please.
Japan graciously responded by
sending a new batch of trees,
3000 trees this time,
and they arrived in--,
they actually arrived
on March 26 in 1912.
And this shows the day after
the spot where the first of
those 3000 trees was planted
along the Tidal Basin the day
after they arrived
in Washington.
It was a very small
ceremony, very private.
It got almost no publicity.
Things were kind of crazy in
the White House because of
William Howard Taft's
reelection, the trees had to
be put into the ground
immediately, to ensure their
survival. So there was a very
small private ceremony.
Only three guests
were there with Mrs. Taft.
One was, well, it was the
Japanese ambassador
and his wife, and Eliza Scidmore.
So she was then in her 50s when
she stood as a witness to this
historic event.
So, next slide, please.
This shows you-- I love this
dramatic photo from
the Library of Congress.
It was taken in 1922,
and it shows the
aerial view of how those
trees were eventually
planted around the Tidal Basin.
I found a wonderful record
at the New York Public Library
in one of the letters to
her editor in New York City,
Eliza actually sketched
out a little map,
telling her editor, "I just came
from the White House
talking to Mrs. Taft.
Here's the plan for
the cherry trees."
And she sketched out these--,
this plan to plant them in
double rows around the
Tidal Basin, which was a
suggestion and undoubtedly
inspired by the trees in Japan.
So, the final years, Eliza,
continued reporting into her 60s
up until World War I.
She became active in the peace
movement, and she became a real
advocate of the
League of Nations.
So she moved to Geneva to
follow events at the League.
And she died in Geneva
in 1928 at the age of 72.
Next slide.
So her ashes were taken
to Yokohama and were
buried at the grave site of
her mother and her brother.
So even though we haven't known
much about Eliza Scidmore until
around the last decade or so
since the centennial of the
planning of the original cherry
trees, the Japanese know
Eliza Scidmore quite well.
They're quite proud of that
record of the trees that they
gave to Washington.
And they also admire her
as an early friend of Japan.
So now, they go to her
gravesite twice a year during
cherry blossom season, and in
November, during the anniversary
of her death, to pay tribute.
So I'll stop there.
That's kind of a brief,
introduction to her,
and I look forward to questions.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
Okay. Thanks so much, Diana,
for that wonderful overview
of your book and your research.
I'm going to start off with some,
some general questions for you
and then we'll delve deeper
into your research that
you did here at the
Library of Congress.
For those of you in the
audience, if you have questions
during our conversation,
please use the Q and A function
in Zoom to submit
your questions,
not the chat.
We'll use the chat,
as you can see, to post
relevant links to resources.
But feel free to post your
questions at any time during our
conversation, and we'll do our
best to answer those after the Q and A--
after we're finished.
So, let's get started, Diana.
First, I'm going to ask
you something that you've
mentioned a little bit.
You also discuss it in the
introduction of your book, but,
could you tell us how you
had the idea to write a
biography on Eliza Scidmore?
>> Diana P. Parsell: Yes. I
was working, about 20 years ago,
living and working in Indonesia
and, I bought a book, 1897.
It was a little paperback
reprint of a book called
"Java: The Garden of the East,"
and it was by an E.R. Scidmore.
And I was impressed by the book.
I thought it held up
quite well after a century.
So I went and did a quick
search, internet search, on
the author, and I was blown
away to find out it was this
woman. It did mention that
she, you know, wrote these books
and that she had this important
role at National Geographic.
But what really stunned me was
learning that she was the--
widely credited as the original
visionary of the trees in
Washington. So I had lived
here for over 30 years.
I went every year to see those
trees, and I had never heard her
name. So that's when I started
going to the Library of Congress
to see what I could find out.
And little at first, I found
very little at first, but
then I kept digging and
digging, and eventually I was
able. I wasn't even sure I had
enough to write a book.
But with time, as I uncovered
records there and at
other institutions, I found her
story far more remarkable than
anybody I think
had ever realized.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
And how long did it take you to
research the book then?
>> Diana P. Parsell:
It took about a decade
to research and write it.
I did run into some
hurdles because of Covid.
There were some records that
were unavailable for various
reasons that there were delays.
And so it was roughly a decade.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
And how did you start
going about your research,
particularly at the
Library of Congress?
>> Diana P. Parsell:
Yes, at the library.
I have not been trained in
academic techniques or anything.
I did take a class in Research
Techniques for Narrative
Writing it was called, and
one of those sessions we had was
a very important one, because
the professor brought us down to
the Library of Congress, and
we had an orientation, with
Thomas Mann, who you may
know is quite a well-versed in
research techniques.
And he introduced
us to databases.
And that turned out to be an
enormously important part of my
research process.
But I also, I went to Eliza's
books, started there.
And I also in this class
that I took, tracked down a
master's thesis that a
relative, a distant cousin of
hers had written,
like, back in 2000.
And it gave me the family
history, and it gave me a few
facts about her
that, that-- offered a really good
starting point. And because
research techniques were not as
advanced at that time, he had
only been able to take the
research up to a certain point.
So I was able to take
a lot of those leads.
And then to really
expand on that
over the years.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
Yeah. I'm sure you could
delve much further
into the databases
and keyword searching and
all that sort of thing
that was not
available beforehand.
>> Diana P. Parsell: I'd
love to say very quickly that,
I was saying that the
research went slowly at first,
and it did in part,
because I did not know
that Eliza Scidmore
wrote most of her
newspaper journalism
under a pen name.
And, so I'm researching her.
Scidmore is an unusual enough
name, but I was kind of just
getting a handful of articles.
And then I found out she wrote
under a pen name, an unusual pen
name Ruhama, which was her
middle name and her paternal
grandmother's name.
Once I plug that into my
keyword search, I got hundreds,
hundreds of articles and I
ended up finding probably over
800 newspaper and magazine
articles she wrote in her
lifetime. And that is when
I realized, wow, I have a book
here. Because those,
you know, those
newspaper and magazine articles,
of course, they gave me a
chronology of where she was
traveling, where she was
traveling, and when, it gave me
a complete record of her
journalism, not just selective
items. And it also gave me her
own words, which was important
because her own papers had
been, I discovered, destroyed
after her death.
So I was able then to use
a lot of her actual words.
You could read between the
lines and really get a sense of
her personality.
>> Elizabeth Novara: So it
sounds like newspapers, really.
Of course, since she's a
journalist and she was so
prolific, they really played
a huge role in your research,
especially the databases
here and other--
you mentioned
"Chronicling America,"
and were there other resources
that you used
for newspapers here?
>> Diana P. Parsell: Well,
not for the newspaper work so much,
but, of course, there were
many, many secondary references
and even primary sources that
I would go to by
chasing down a clue.
So, and then you would
find, you know, little bits of--
A good example would be
her brother's consular record.
I could find diplomatic
records and, in both
books of primary sources that
talked about a brother George's
career. And so connecting all
these dots was very useful.
>> Elizabeth Novara: That's
great. How did-- You talk about this
a little, in the
presentation, that her family,
her mother and brother
had moved to Japan.
So how did her family,
especially her mother and
brother, play a role in
encouraging her interest in
journalism and travel writing?
>> Diana P. Parsell:
Well, she came actually from a
journalistic family
to a degree because
she spent her early years,
as I mentioned, in
the Midwest, in Madison,
Wisconsin, up until the age of
five. And her uncle was
the founder of
the Wisconsin State Journal.
And then Eliza had an older
half brother, 13 years older,
who became an
apprentice to the uncle.
So then I found later that that
half brother became a journalist
after the Civil War
in Washington.
So when Eliza went
to Philadelphia
to report on the exhibition,
I discovered in city
directories that her brother
Eddie was working as a
journalist in Washington for the
paper that she published
her first articles in.
So this is really, of course,
how you put together
all these pieces. So he
became her stepping stone.
And her mother was an
inspiration because
Mrs. Scidmore was a
pretty admirable character.
She had three marriages
and the second two
of those failed,
which I think helps explain
why she left the Midwest in the
middle of the Civil War,
went to Washington, D.C.
She needed to support her
family, and there were jobs in
D.C. Plus, there was
anonymity, I think, for this
woman who kind of wanted
to get away from her past.
So she was very enterprising.
She was very socially
ambitious, very hardworking.
And I think in her story,
you could really see a lot of
the traits that help account
for Eliza's own later success,
the self-reliance and
the work ethic.
And Mrs. Scidmore
actually became
a travel to-- companion to
Eliza for some of her travels.
There was a great-- I have
a scene in the book where
they both climbed
Mount Fuji together.
They traveled quite a lot
together in the Far East.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
And she had also--
Eliza's mother had also traveled
before, as well, I believe.
>> Diana P. Parsell: Well,
I think there is this letter,
in the grant papers that Mrs.
Scidmore went abroad in 1873,
and she's traveling, I believe,
according to my records,
with her son, George.
So she is trying to get George
interested in a career
in the consular service because
a cousin of George's had been
doing this. So Mrs. Scidmore
went abroad with her son,
and this is a letter of
introduction that she carried
from President Grant saying,
you know, please accord
Mrs. Scidmore the courtesy of
your help while she's abroad.
So this goes to show you
just what a go-getter
Mrs. Scidmore herself was.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
And probably also inspired
her daughter to travel-- to enjoy traveling
as well and
become a go-getter.
>> Diana P. Parsell:
Absolutely.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
I was also very struck by
the vivid descriptions
of places that Scidmore
had traveled or lived in,
traveled to, visited.
Including territorial Alaska,
Japan, China, Java,
just to name a
few of the places.
>> Diana P. Parsell: Right.
>> Elizabeth Novara: how did you
go about the painstaking task
of constructing what
these places were like
in the late 19th and early
20th century?
>> Diana P. Parsell: Well,
you mentioned the vividness
and that comes from very
specific and concrete details.
So I was always on
the lookout for those.
But because her travels were
so extensive, it meant that
I couldn't go on at length
on any of these.
And so as the people in my book
writing group will tell you,
I have a tendency to write
long descriptive passages.
But in the end, I had to be
ruthless and cut, cut, cut and
right to the bone, because
there wasn't room in the book
for those kinds of
extended passages.
So having those very specific
details really was what made it
possible to capture places
vividly in economical
descriptions. And so I consult,
you know, I needed to have a
clear idea of it in my own mind.
So I consulted maps
and photographs.
I went to other
travelers' accounts.
Just to give you one
example of the kind of thing
you're looking for, I found a
traveler's account from the
19th century. He's talking
about going off to Japan,
and he describes riding the
train across the, the continent
to meet his ship
on the West Coast.
And he says the train was racing
along at 25 miles an hour.
So that is just a small phrase
that carries such weight
in terms of vividness.
So it's those small, precise
descriptions that
I was always trying to capture.
>> Elizabeth Novara: So what
were some of the challenges
with writing, again,
about late 19th century
and early 20th
century perspectives,
especially with white
privilege and race?
And how did you decide was
the best way to address those
issues in your book?
Because you do discuss that.
>> Diana P. Parsell: I
do discuss them briefly,
and it was a part
of the book that
made me very nervous, because
I think discussing these issues
requires kind of a theoretical
understanding of the issues and
even to some degree
a specialized language.
I mean, you need to
have the context,
and I had not studied any of
this in my education, so
I didn't really feel I had a
grounding for discussing it,
and it made me nervous.
But I discussed it with my
editor and we knew we had to
address it of course.
But I wasn't quite sure
how to, how to explain it.
But my editor at Oxford
University Press offered to
send the manuscript out to
experts, and they, they sent some
comments. And based on those
comments, we were able to
integrate some of that context
into the book, although it was
written primarily
for a general reader.
So, you know, we, we touched on
those issues, but we did not go
into, into great length,
for that reason.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
Thanks. That's a great
kind of explanation of
how you work with an editor
when publishing a book,
which I think some of
our audience would
find intriguing.
You mentioned
throughout the book,
that Scidmore was
an early adopter
of many new forms of
amateur photography.
Could you discuss
a little about the
importance of photography
to Scidmore's career, both as a
journalist and a writer?
>> Diana P. Parsell:
Yes. I found the first evidence
that she took up
photography in a letter
to one of her editors
in New York in 1890.
She was on her way to--
She was on her way to Alaska.
I think it was her third trip.
She expected to see John Muir
because she knew he was working
that summer doing field
work in Glacier Bay.
So she writes in this letter to
her editor, I would love to do
a profile of him.
And by the way, I can get
photographs of him against
the Arctic scenery.
Now, this is 1890 and
the Kodak box camera had
only been introduced
two years earlier.
So this tells us already she
is an early adopter of this, this
technology. So she carried a
camera with her throughout her
travels. Newspapers and
magazines were not yet using,
they were not yet printing
photographs for the most part,
it was too complicated for mass,
you know, mass
production publications.
But her, her-- the magazine
she wrote for even a few
newspapers converted her
photographs to line drawings or
to woodcut illustrations.
So, late around 1905
or so was when
National Geographic
changed its format
and started running
a lot of pictures.
So she then has
developed a relationship with
the Geographic about this time.
And she then took some
photographs for them.
But her real role for them,
from what I discovered, was that
she acquired lots of photographs
for National
Geographic. They suddenly had
this hunger for photographs,
and because she spent so
much time in the Far East,
she was able to
find and track down
high quality
photographs on Japan,
Korea, China.
So, but, also the Smithsonian
at one point lent her
a camera and film because
they were interested in
what she would find out
that was interesting in
museum collections abroad,
for example. There was a--, I found a--, I think
it was a 13-page letter
that she wrote to the head of
the National Museum reporting
to him about her travels in
India and having visited
a half dozen museums.
And these were the
things that she saw.
>> Elizabeth Novara: Wow. And
then some of her photographs,
they ended up at
National Geographic or--
>> Diana P. Parsell: Yes, there
are some of hers at Geographic.
The problem there is that a lot
of the photographs they have are
labeled as being by her,
and they almost
certainly were not.
They were mixed in together.
But the Smithsonian has 2 or
300 of her photographs,
and I think those
are very reliably
we can say, taken by her.
So it is a very good
record of her photography.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
That's great. So she had a
really important
photographic output
as well as journalistic
output as well.
>> Diana P. Parsell: Absolutely.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
Another question for you.
Who was Emily MacVeagh and how
did she and Eliza Scidmore
become friends?
>> Diana P. Parsell: So Emily
MacVeagh was a Chicago socialite
who had a real
taste for decorating.
She had several homes
and she was a big collector.
And, Eliza apparently met her,
I believe in the winter of 1900,
when Eliza was in India,
researching her book, and
they became very good friends.
And Eliza actually became sort
of a buyer's agent for Emily,
collecting a lot of, you know,
lovely treasures and
artifacts from Japan and China.
And then Emily MacVeagh's
husband, Franklin MacVeagh, became
William Howard Taft's treasury
secretary in Washington.
So when Emily moved to
Washington, she and Eliza then,
you know, spent time together.
And, you can see Eliza
moving in these really high
level circles, you know,
social circles in D.C.
So, yes, the letters are
wonderful because they showed a
personal side of Eliza
that I did not get from her
journalism. And there's a
playful side, a very
intimate side of her
that didn't show up elsewhere.
And so they were--, I thought they
were very, very important to
include this friendship
because it showed Eliza's
more tender side and also her
capacity for female friendship.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
And those letters were within
the Franklin MacVeagh papers.
Her husband-- They were
her husband's papers.
So that's something important
to point out, that often women's
papers are kind of subsumed
within the papers of male
relatives. So that's one
way to look for-- to find women's history
within manuscript materials.
>> Diana P. Parsell:
Such an excellent point.
And that very point was made
to me when I was working at the
library and went to the women
and gender study discussion
group that they had, and
we would have these brown bag
lunches. And I brought that
question up to, you know, there
were a lot of women's
studies experts.
And I said, "Why are these
records so hard to find?"
And they said that exact same
thing to me, because women's
history is often
buried in the papers
of the men in their lives.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
So this perfectly
illustrates that point, I think.
>> Diana P. Parsell: Absolutely.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
How did you discover that
Scidmore's letters were
even within this collection?
>> Diana P. Parsell:
Because they were alluded to
in the master's
thesis that I found.
This was a project that
some members of the family
had worked on for many, many
years, and they had uncovered
the, I don't know that
they, consulted all the
letters, but they certainly
referred to the friendship and
to the letters. So I was able
to go actually, and to see them
and to transcribe
them all at the library.
And they became, as I said,
they were an important source.
I'm sure there are many,
many letters out there of
Eliza Scidmore in other
collections elsewhere,
but I did not come across them.
This is-- I feel like this
biography is just
the beginning of what we are
going to learn about her life.
There had never been
a biography of her,
and I could take it so far.
And then you, you know,
just you have to stop and write.
But, I think this goes
to show that we probably
can find lots of material from
her in other places, but it's
never labeled as being
her letters at all.
>> Elizabeth Novara: Yes.
And I know you found some
references in other collections
here at the library
in the Manuscript Division.
What were some of those
collections that you consulted?
>> Diana P. Parsell: Well,
the Alexander Graham Bell
papers were very, very
important because of Eliza's
affiliation with
National Geographic.
She-- I was able to determine,
became a good personal friend of
the family. And that came
partly through these papers and
partly through papers
that I found at the
National Geographic, because
they were all involved at the
National Geographic. Alexander
Graham Bell's father-in-law
was one of the founders of the
Geographic and a major mentor to
Eliza Scidmore during her
career. Bell's son-in-law,
Gilbert Grosvenor, became
Eliza's editor at
National Geographic magazine.
And then his other son-in-law
was David Fairchild, the U.S.
botanist I already alluded
to earlier in the talk.
So you begin now to see
this cozy little family
in Washington. And Eliza is
right in the middle of that
circle. So you can see the
importance and the influence
of that. And by
using the papers in the
Alexander Graham
Bell collection,
I was able to get some
new insights into that. The Taft
papers were very helpful.
Yeah. This is a letter
from Mabel Bell,
Alexander Graham Bell's wife,
writing to him and saying,
"You know, Alec, you've got
this presentation coming up
and you haven't done
anything with your slides.
You want me to
call Miss Scidmore?"
So it's those small
references that really
enrich the text.
There were letters in the
Taft papers that were important
that showed Eliza appealing
to President Taft about her
brother's appointments
in Japan, in Korea.
And there were, there was
a letter that hinted at
their association in the peace
movement after the war.
I also consulted the Benjamin
Harrison papers because
I found out Eliza
interviewed
the first lady,
Caroline Harrison.
And she became a good
friend of the family.
So I went there and looked
through those papers
as well for context on that.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
And, you also found--
There were some letters
in the Taft papers
specifically about the
cherry trees as well.
>> Diana P. Parsell:
This was a very important note
that came from the
wife of Yukio Ozaki,
who was the mayor of Tokyo.
He was the one that after they--
Japan decided to donate these
trees, it was decided they would
be given in the name of,
Tokyo to the city of Washington.
So, Ozaki took a great
interest in the project.
And this is a
letter from his wife.
When the second batch
arrived, she wrote personally to
Mrs. Taft to say, you know,
we're so pleased to donate
these, and we want you to know
that it's a really clean batch
of trees. And we look forward
to having this expression of
friendship between the
United States and Japan
in the center of Washington.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
All right. That's wonderful.
I love that letter.
And it's actually, it's a seven-page letter.
So it's, it's got a
lot of detail to it.
>> Diana P. Parsell:
It's interesting. People say,
"Well, how did she know how
to, you know, speak English?"
But she was actually from a
British-Japanese marriage.
So she was fluent in English,
and she actually was a woman who
apparently translated
Japanese folktales into English.
So her English was quite good.
So that explains why
she's so fluent here
in English.
>> Elizabeth Novara: Well,
thank you so much for explaining
some more of the
details of your book,
and especially
going in depth about
your research here at
the Library of Congress.
I think we're going to have
to now move to our Q and A
session with our audience.
So if you have questions,
please place them
in the Q and A box.
I'm going to stop sharing
my screen here for a moment.
So that we can look
at the questions.
Okay. So we do have
several questions here.
First, Lynn Rosenthal says "I'm
interested in knowing whether
Eliza Scidmore knew
Rose Wilder Lane
and Frances Benjamin Johnston,
contemporaries of hers."
>> Diana P. Parsell: Those names
have not come up in my research.
I do have the names of quite
a number of women
that she socialized with.
But those names don't
strike a bell with me.
>> Elizabeth Novara: I think
some of those might have been
other photographers
of the time period.
So I don't know.
>> Diana P. Parsell: As I said,
you know, there could be
an association there
that I didn't uncover.
But in my general
reading, you know,
you tend to see the same names
coming up over and over again
because they're
socializing together.
They're traveling together.
They're, you know, coming home
on a ship or something.
But I didn't see--
I don't recall at all
seeing those names.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
Okay. Another question.
Jesse Oldman-- Oldham says,
what research finds surprised
you the most? And what area of
digging for info has
stymied you thus far?
>> Diana P. Parsell: Well,
the certainly I was stymied
at the lack of
personal papers because
I did discover from this
family history that
a relative, a young cousin
living with Eliza at her death,
destroyed her papers.
So that was a huge, huge,
disappointment.
And biographies, of course,
depend so much on personal
papers that it was when I kind
of wondered if I'd be able to
even have enough
for a biography.
As to what findings
surprised me the most,
I've already mentioned the
journalism. I was blown away
at her journalistic record.
I don't think anybody had
ever looked at her record--
I know nobody had ever looked
at her record as a whole.
And once I did, I realized what
a pathbreaking journalist
she was starting in the 1870s.
I mean, that was really early.
So that was the biggest,
one of the biggest findings.
And the second big
surprise finding
was her reporting on China,
and I have never heard this
mentioned in any of the reports
about her, that she made
at least half a dozen trips to
China, and she started reporting
on China and actually
wrote a book on China.
She went back and forth
to China many times.
She called Peking her
favorite city in Asia.
And she was really on the
edge of developments in
China. She could understand
from the tenor in the air that
there were big changes
coming here in the political
and then, of course,
Japan went to war with China
in 1894, '95.
And it changed the whole
balance of power in Asia.
And Eliza is right there
reporting on a lot of this
stuff. So it was, it was one
of the big surprise findings.
I ended up having to devote
a lot more attention to China
reporting in the book than
I knew when I went into it.
>> Elizabeth Novara: The next
question, Catherine Blood says
"Thank you for your
wonderful talk,
valuable research,
and also kind sharing
of your expertise,
with Mari and me.
I think you mentioned some
of the biggest revelations for
you were related to Scidmore's
accomplishments as a journalist.
Could you say a bit more about
how rare or common women
were in the profession
during the 19th century,
perhaps especially
as travel writers?"
>> Diana P. Parsell: Well,
that's an excellent question,
because I was stunned
at Eliza's record.
But I also was surprised at how
many women were beginning to
work in journalism.
I found an excellent, excellent
reference called "Out on
Assignment" by Alice Fahs, a
historian, which talked about
women entering journalism in
large numbers in the 1880s.
So, by the end of the, you know,
by the end of the 1800s,
there were quite a number of
women going in newspaper work.
But Eliza was a bit ahead of
that, and I was surprised to
find how many women were
working in Washington.
To find some records that
actually listed the women that
had credentials from the
press gallery on Capitol Hill.
And there were like 19 or 20,
and that was remarkable.
So women had been, you know,
individually, women had
been editing magazines and had
been contributing to magazines.
It tended to be, you know,
sometimes stories and poetry.
But there were quite a few
women working in, you know,
contributing to publications
but not quite yet out on the
streets, so to speak,
working as reporters.
So Eliza Scidmore, I think,
was really in that first wave of
women who began doing this.
And it had to do with after the
war, papers expanding their
pages to include women's news
and wanting women in Washington
to cover the social scene
because it was this, you know,
time when there was a lot of
elaborate entertaining, etc..
So a lot of women found this
as a wonderful alternative to
working as teachers, or in
factories, or whatever, which was
much lower pay.
I mean, freelance journalism,
you didn't make a lot of money,
but it gave them
a new opportunity.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
So Beverly Brannon asks,
"Did you come across the
name of travel photographer
Zaida Ben-Yusuf, who
traveled in Japan in the
late 1890s and early 1900s?"
>> Diana P. Parsell:
I did, and it's interesting.
I don't know the whole story,
but there was a bit of a
falling out because they
went to Koyasan in Japan,
and this Miss Yusuf was
supposed to take the photographs
and Eliza was to
write the story.
And I believe this was for
National Geographic or maybe
for the Century Magazine.
But as it turns out, in the end,
I gather that Yusuf wrote
an article and Eliza was
furious because she felt
betrayed and she had to, like,
buy back the, I don't know,
something about she had
to break the contract.
I found some correspondence 
with her brother
who's supporting her on this,
but they had a falling out
over, over that.
So there was this encounter.
I don't know too much about it
other than the references
in, in a couple of Eliza's letters.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
Thank you.
Amy Foss asked, "Did she consider
bringing any other Japanese
trees or plants besides the
cherry trees in
Washington, D.C.?"
>> Diana P. Parsell: Not that
I know of, but she became--
Yeah. No, that's not true.
Because she was quite
interested in plants, and
she wrote a lot about plants.
And there was a story
that she wrote for a while,
she and her mother took up
this fad in Japan, that they
had revived this fad for
growing Japanese morning
glories. And they weren't
typical morning glories.
They would turn morning
glories, you know, they would
make these hybrid morning
glories that had all kinds of
unusual shapes and colors.
And Eliza and her mother took
up this, and then they tried to
get this morning glory growing,
Japanese morning glories
growing in America.
And, but it never took off
because apparently it was
quite difficult.
But that was an example.
She actually wrote an article
in the Century Magazine, and
she wrote a 35-page paper
on Japanese morning glories
that she actually presented
to the Japan Society
in London. And it was
published in a journal.
So this kind of tells you how
obsessive she could be
when she, when she found a
subject of interest.
>> Elizabeth Novara:
So I think we're
running out of time.
I'm sorry. There are still a
few more questions here, but
I don't think we're
going to get to them.
However, if you have additional
questions, you can send them to
Ask a Librarian,
which I will show you the
link in just a moment.
Thank you so much,
Diana, for joining me
and Mari today, to discuss
your research, and all the
discoveries that you made
while researching your
biography on Eliza Scidmore.
I just want to briefly
mention to the audience,
that there are
some upcoming events
at the Library of Congress.
Japanese Culture Day will
be on Saturday, March 23,
and this event features
family activities including
Japanese drum and traditional
dance performances,
a book author
talk, storytelling,
arts and crafts from Japan
and you can check out the
link in the chat to learn more.
There's also going to be
a small exhibit showcasing
Cherry Blossom
imagery and artwork
from the Prints and
Photographs Division,
which is on view
now until April 24.
And here is the link to the
Ask a Librarian if you have
additional questions
that we didn't
get a chance to answer today,
please feel free to send them
to our Ask a Librarian site.
So thank you, Diana, again.
It was such a pleasure to
talk with you about your book.
And thank you to everyone
who attended today's
Made at the Library event.
I hope everyone has a
good rest of their day.