Stumbling Stones in Arlington, Virginia

Each marker is about six inches in diameter. It may have a name, it may have a date, or maybe it says “unknown.” These bronze Stumbling Stones are placed near sites where a few of the more than 1,500 enslaved people who worked in Arlington County from the 1600s to the 1800s lived and worked.

Over the past few years, the Arlington Historical Society and Black Heritage Museum of Arlington have coordinated a project called Memorializing the Enslaved in Arlington, or MEA. A publicly accessible database and map provides as much information as has been uncovered about individuals and families.

The concept of the stumbling stones comes from Germany. In the 1990s, artist Gunter Demnig began creating stolpersteines near the homes where people murdered by the Nazis once lived. More than 100,000 have been laid—yes, a small percentage of the whole but a visible sign of lives uprooted and destroyed. Arlington adapted and began installing and unveiling the markers in 2025.

I attended a ceremony in the North Highlands area of Arlington in early November. The stones in front of the Dawson Terrace Community Center (once the farm of Thomas Owslet) mark the lives two people, Bess and Henry. Research uncovered scant details about their lives, but at least the discovery process has begun.

MEA works with the county to safely install the markers on or near sidewalks. The MEA website provides information on sponsoring a Stumbling Stone, as well as the database, maps, and other information.

U.S. Colored Troops Call-Out

Veterans Day 2025 was cold, the task initially a bit scattered. The African American Civil War Museum organized a call-out of the names of 209,000 Black men who served in the U.S. Army and Navy during the Civil War.

I can’t vouchsafe that every name was read, but we came close, using multiple microphones and lists.

The ceremony and name-reading took place across the street from the museum, which is scheduled to open in a historic school (the Grimke School) near the corner of 14th and U Streets Northwest.

The Museum has erected the statue you see in this photo. (I have just coldly stepped to one of six or so microphones.) Behind is a plaque that lists the name of all 209,145 USCT soldiers and officers.

After presentation of the colors, national anthem singing, and the like, several Black retired military offices recounted their—and in many cases, other family members’—service to the country. In the current political climate, it was a great way to spend Veterans Day.

Molly is one of the founding directors of History Revealed, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to uncovering the lives of lesser-known individuals and groups. Through historic documents, artifacts, buildings, and the landscape, they aim to “connect the dots of information in search of the larger story.”

In March, I volunteered at one of HRI’s periodic Transcribe-a-Thons conducted in partnership with Alexandria Archaeology. Intrigued, I asked her more about the project, called Shopping Stories.

A timely P.S.! As we went back and forth on this post, another Transcribe-a-Thon was announced for July 19 at Lloyd House in Alexandria. An enticement is to taste some of the teas listed in the ledgers. You can email Alexandria Archaeology to RSVP or for more information.

Q: How do you quickly describe Shopping Stories?

A: Shopping Stories is a crowd-sourced, public history project to digitize, transcribe, and publish eighteenth-century merchant accounts.

Q: What gave you the idea to undertake it, and when?

 A: HRI launched the project as an expansion of a transcribing effort initially undertaken in 2011 by George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Fairfax County Park Authority. It focused on the ledgers of John Glassford & Company for stores in Alexandria and Colchester, Virginia, with an attempt to inform archaeological research work being conducted by both organizations. 

 More recently, we’ve begun to transcribe the ledgers of Robert Townsend Hooe and his associates over time. Robert Townsend Hooe got his start in Alexandria 1770 coming from Port Tobacco, Maryland, and continued as a merchant in Alexandria into the early 19th century.

Q: What is a ledger and why transcribe them?

A: Like today, 18th-century businesses needed a way to keep track of their transactions.  These records comprised a series of books from scribbles kept at the moment (like receipts), a daily log of all the transactions (similar to an end of day cash register close-out), and an end of the year summary of every transaction.  Each provides similar information, just in different ways. Most often surviving to the present are the daily log and the summary volume.  The daily log, or journal, gives us by day, the order each customer entered the store and what they purchased or how they provided payment, as well as who made the purchase/payment. The end of the year summary, or ledger, gives us a summarized list of all transactions by a specific customer. The ledger was the legal document a business would use as evidence in court should a customer be delinquent in payment or for any other reason.

The simple answer to why transcribe them is that they provide access to the people (through account holders and shoppers), popular and necessary things (through purchases), places (through notations about the people and purchases), and events (either directly mentioned or inferred through what is purchased) of a community. Business ledgers are an underutilized primary source that provide a wealth of information that reveal insights into the lives of the less prominent members of a community, including women and the enslaved, once you get beyond the structure of the pages. 

Q: What have you learned about shopping in 18th century Alexandria—e.g., a few large stores and/or lots of small? Were there fixed prices?

 A: Just like today, shopping in 18th-century Alexandria was competitive with several stores operating simultaneously; we know there were upwards of four or five stores in the small community of Colchester [in present-day Lorton, Virginia] in the early 1760s!

The American Revolution reset access to inventory, making merchants operate in a more speculative way, often selling merchandise directly from harbored ships rather than behind the counter in a store. Pricing depended on accessibility, length of time goods remained on the shelves, how you paid for the goods, and whether you had a relationship with the merchant, either in person or through a friend or relative. Being able to give specific numbers to specific goods is one of the reasons we want to publish the transcripts in a database – to allow for these kinds of comparisons.

Both stores sold a large range of items. Glassford stores focused mostly on the daily goods needed by small farmers from tools to fabrics to spices. Early on, Hooe’s stores sold similar goods to Glassford, but as time passed, the store became more like a bank moving money between customers, providing us a glimpse of the community and its relationships.

 Q: How did the stores obtain the goods they sold? Were there wholesalers like we would recognize today?

 A: The John Glassford & Company stores in Virginia and Maryland ordered and acquired goods through their primary company in Glasgow, Scotland. The store managers submitted their orders to the company, and as today, would get sent what the company thought they needed – which wasn’t always the same thing.

Alexander Henderson, the store manager in Colchester, often complained to Glassford about the goods he was sent. For example, in one letter, he said, “The Complaints of the Shooes sent Sir for these two Years have been so great & frequent that I cannot help taking notice of it again.  I therefore begg that particular care may be taken in chusing these. The Kilmarnock Shoes are intolerably bad.” (All spelling from the original, contained in Henderson Letterbook, Scheme 1760, page 28a, at the Local History/Special Collections, Alexandria Public Library.)

As the Hooe stores operated independently, they required relationships with multiple suppliers to provide the goods needed. Letters and invoices show how Hooe and his partners worked with suppliers throughout Europe and the Caribbean to source goods for sale.  

Based on what we can learn from the invoices, both Alexandria stores occasionally acted as local wholesalers selling large quantities of goods for others to sell elsewhere, as well as undertook to purchase saleable goods at low prices for themselves and then had mark-ups for retail costs based on the availability of goods, payment process (cash or credit), and relationship with the customer. 

Q: Do you have a favorite example(s) of discovery?

 A: I’ll confess this is a tough one because there are so many small threads that can be pulled to learn about the Alexandria community. If we look at items purchased, while there were certainly unique things like violins and carriages, I hadn’t really thought about how what was purchased could alone hint at a story. Like the sale of bombasine and alamode being primarily purchased as mourning fabrics; Captain William Bronaugh purchased them from the Colchester store after the death of his wife and mother in 1761. While it took digging through other records to learn who had died, seeing evidence that someone had died based on the purchase of specific fabrics surprised me.

Or, the discovery of city residents who otherwise don’t appear in the records, like an enslaved man named L’Amour. We can track his approximate arrival to be hired out by the Alexandria store around 1778/1779 through the 1780s. L’Amour played a role in the recovery of guns seized from Mount Vernon and was manumitted by Richard Harrison in 1791 (both details had been noted by the George Washington Papers), but the ledgers allow us to learn more about L’Amour’s daily life in Alexandria. 

Q: Beyond the occasional “a-ha” moment, how do you see making use of the more common routine entries?

A: Those routine entries may be a little boring to a transcriber, but they can provide insight into overall store practices. The hope is to be able to track, over time, the different types of purchases and payments in a more macro way. By adding up all the “Totals” over time, we’ll be able to get a better sense of the amount of money moving into and out of the stores by customer, by place, and types of goods. 

Q: Roughly how many pages have been transcribed, and what is there still to do? What does a transcriber do?

A: Between the John Glassford & Company and more recently acquired Hooe-related accounts, we have already transcribed nearly 8,000 of the over 10,000 pages between the two collections.  The project has involved more than 450 students and interested individuals in partnership with universities and Alexandria Archaeology.

Currently, work focuses on transcribing the ledgers or letters of the Hooe-related materials. Transcribers go to the website From the Page to select the type of document they’d like to transcribe from the Shopping Stories project. For the ledgers, we use a template to transfer the pages into a format similar to a spreadsheet with each bit of information from the original having a home in the template. For the letters, transcribers input the letter into a text box. We provide instructions for each and have a running glossary and abbreviation list of (un)commonly found words found in the documents to help.  From the Page helps transcribers find pages that need work or they can select a page based on date (for the journals) or account holder (for the ledgers). They can spend as little or as much time as needed to work on each page before saving and moving on to the next story to be found.

The primary effort behind the scenes has been to edit the transcriptions and investigate ways to publish the transcripts to make them accessible to the public and allow for analysis. As you can imagine, streamlining all these documents into a compatible format and standardization of words is an ongoing and immense undertaking.  

Q:  You were focused on ledgers, now letters have come into the picture. How did you find them, and what is the goal with that part of the project?

A: The addition of the letters to our transcribing efforts is an extension of the collection of material associated with Hooe and his associates found at the New York Public Library.  The Hooe & Harrison letterbook was included as part of its “Virginia. Alexandria. Hooe & Harrison” collection. Given that these letters cover primarily a period of time when no ledgers survive, our hope is they will provide insight into the happenings at the store during that period without the financial transaction records.   

Over the last four years, History Revealed received a series of grants and fellowships from the Historic Alexandria Foundation and the Omohundro Institute to photograph and publish twelve ledgers, journals, daybooks, an invoice book, and a letterbook found at the New York Public Library, as well as a journal (from the Hooe store) from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

We’ve also been exploring ways to publish the transcripts online through a partnership with the University of Central Florida. 

Q: How can people get involved to transcribe?

A: While our focus has been on recruiting and working with transcribers through a partnership with Alexandria Archaeology, the Shopping Stories project is open to anyone interested in volunteering to transcribe. We encourage anyone who is interested in volunteering with us to check out the project through From the Page:  https://fromthepage.com/historyrevealed. We also hope to have another group transcribe-a-thon later in 2025. [As noted above, now scheduled for July 19, 2025.]

I went to the sixteenth annual Biographers International Conference on June 5 and 6 at the National Press Club in Washington. It gave me a great jolt of energy and optimism.

Despite the fraught times, etc. etc. (and I am not minimizing them), biographers are tackling difficult subjects, raising up overlooked people, and helping each other succeed. “What about this?” “Have you looked at that?” “This is how I dealt with….” Lots of sharing of ideas and work-arounds.

I consider my current project, about Alexandria during the Civil War, a “biography of a place.” So I didn’t feel like a total outlier.

My conference began with breakfast at Old Ebbits Grill with three members of a virtual writing group that grew out of the 2020 BIO conference. (We have never all met in person and, in fact, I met one of my breakfast mates in person for the first time!) Then I took a bus to Howard University for an orientation of the Moorland-Springarn Research Center. The curator of the University Archives gave an overview and offered a few ideas for each person’s project or research question. Her more generalizable suggestion is to start a search with Digital Howard.

That afternoon, authors of newly published books gave short readings, following by an awards presentation. I was on one of the awards committees and presented the Hazel Rowley Prize (which supports a first-time biographer) to Elizabeth Schott, who is writing a biography of textile designer Dorothy Wright Liebes. It was great to do that.

The conference began in earnest early the next morning. (Here is the program.) A few take-aways:

• Journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, despite all their experence, agree “the blank screen is a killer.” (i.e., the writing part is hard). I was comforted to know that they go back to previous notes and interviews to rediscover things they did not follow up on, things they now see differently, and the like.

• A session on AI surfaced concerns for copyright and liaibility, but also a good reminder to explore what AI can offer. One random idea is to provide a few paragraph description of a writing piece and request a tagline for it. I need to learn more.

• FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests take time and require persistence. Conversely, be ready to download information when, out of the blue, you get an email with a link to the requested information. One presenter keeps a spreadsheet of her FOIA requests (obviously, she does a lot of them). Then every few months, she can follow up with “do yo have an update on…”

• Documentary filmmaker Dawn Porter, recipient of the 2025 BIO Awasd, pitches her ideas with a sense of the story— the visuals and what she can bring to the subject (not just a recitation of interesting facts about the subject)

• People still use business cards, at least biographers do. I am glad I brought some.

I’ve had another website, www.fullcircle.org, what I always called my business website, for way longer—since 1996! I renewed it annually, assuming that it remained a place-holder for folks to find me, although I had not updated it in a long time.

While I am still freelancing, I paused this year when the annual notice came. And I decided that I did not need it anymore.

Back in the Olden Days

When I started my business in 1996, I offered “writing, editing, and desktop publishing.” DTP—revolutionary at the time, quaint now. I chose the name Full Circle Communications because I offered to take a publication “full circle,” from initial idea to finished product. Over the years, I focused on the front-end writing and editing, which I enjoyed more than design and production and which I knew were my strengths.

A graphic artist and fellow home-based business mom, Irene Stefanski, designed my first logo, along with a business card and stationary. What a thrill! She created this:

After a few months, I ventured into a very exciting way to offer my services to the world: a “homepage.” Another one of those then-revolutionary, now-quaint terms.

It was 1996. Dot.coms were just starting up. The domain www.fullcircle.com was taken by a company that did employee relocations, so I used www.fullcircle.org. Heck, I was almost a nonprofit at that point, anyhow. (Fullcircle.com is now used by a farm-to-doorstep company.)

A Progression of Web Designs

To retrieve my old sites, I turned to Wayback Machine. As you probably know, Wayback Machine is having a moment now, as the Trump Administration and other entities are trying to scrub their web content of any topics or language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (which they perceive as dangerous. But don’t get me started.)

My very first site was not archived. I think there is some vestige of it in the depths of my computer, I hope it shows up someday. For better or worse, I see that I did change the main message of the site in 1999 and 2005:

The Drupal Era

In the next iteration, I hired a designer through DC Webwomen for a Drupal site that I could maintain. At the time, I loved this one:

At some point, however, Drupal was having security problems beyond what my husband and I could fix.

My next solution—and look—used Squarespace.

Coming Full Circle

Lots of companies use “Full Circle” in their name, and many have “Communications” as well. For the record, I trademarked the name in 1999. If I were aggressive, I could go after the other Full Circle Communications out there, but chose to be defensive. If someone came after me, I could hold out the trademark, which expires in 2029.

Periodically I get emails intended for other Full Circles, some quite personal. I wonder if that will continue.

Meanwhile, if you are reading this before April 19, 2025, go to www.fullcircle.org for a last look. Otherwise, keep coming here, to paulawhitacre.com. Love to see you.

I have a long way to go until I (hopefully) get to open that box to see bound books inside, entitled (or perhaps modified?) Alexandria on Edge: Civil War, Reconstruction, and Remembrance on the Banks of the Potomac. When I submitted my text and image files, the editor wrote, “Congratulations on finishing your first draft.” It’s about the eightieth draft, but who’s counting?

The manuscript goes on to two peer reviewers. I expect a lot of comments to respond to. It will be copy-edited, laid out with photos, indexed, reviewed at various stages. Or not to get too far ahead of things—I hope I have to deal with all these steps.

For now, I’m doing a lot of picking up the strands of life that I let unravel as I neared the deadline.

Including, before I forget, a few ideas to share about how I got to that point.

Use the proposal to your advantage. As you may already know, most nonfiction books are sold with a proposal rather than a completed manuscript. If you have an idea that’s been kicking around your head for awhile, the temptation is to write the darn thing. Be patient. A proposal is your friend. You have to explain the idea in a simple and compelling way, organize the idea in an annotated table of contents, and figure out the appeal of the idea by comparing it to other published works. My two go-to books: Thinking Like Your Editor by Sue Rabiner and How to Write a Book Proposal by Jody Rein with Michael Larson.

Honor your body clock. I figured out several years ago that my best time to write is in the morning after breakfast. (That’s what I am doing right now.) Unless required, no appointments made before noon. Email turned off. Routine tasks pushed to the afternoon or evening. Your best time may differ, but guard it once you have figured it out.

Push forward and double back. Once I started drafting the text in earnest, I started at the beginning and worked my way to the end. At two points, I took big breaks, printed out, read what I had—around the middle (when the Civil War chapters end) and at the close. Then I reviewed the whole, finding holes and duplicative passages. Big exception: I wrote the Introduction almost at the very end. By then, I wrote it quickly and it was one of the sections with the least revising.

Ask for feedback. I had six “beta” readers. If you don’t know that term, they are not editors or fact-checkers, but people who offer to read to identify problems based on their experience and perspectives. My team included several people with deep knowledge of parts of my subject but also people without this knowledge who could point out confusing or boring parts.

Let it go. I could have turned in the manuscript a few weeks earlier. One more point? One more source? I could still be noodling with it. A lesson gained a few years ago, when I attended a talk by Michael C.C. Adams, author of Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War (yes, I know, not the cheeriest of topics). He mentioned a few relevant things he learned after publication of the book, thus he could not include. That was a lightbulb moment for me—if it happens to him, it’s okay if it happens to me.

Make it speak. This was a line from my writing colleague Lauren Arrington as she was finishing her own manuscript, another history with contemporary relevance. The current situation charged her writing, she said. At the time, I was struggling with the last chapter and conclusion, both of which aim to show why the Civil War and Reconstruction are relevant today. I wrote “MAKE IT SPEAK” on a post-it note and put it above my computer.

What happens next? I will let you know!

I met Sara Fitzgerald, author of the book The Silenced Muse, through BIO (Biographers International Organization). In 2022, she hosted a fundraising dinner that brought together eight Washington-area biographers to talk about their current projects and writing in general. At the time, she was looking for a home for her book, and she found it several months later.

Recently, we exchanged emails so I could ask her more about her book’s subject, as well as tips about research and writing.

Q: For those who haven’t read your book yet, who was Emily Hale and why do you title it “the silenced muse”?

A: Emily Hale was an American woman, a talented amateur actress, and a speech and drama teacher who was the longtime secret love of the Nobel-Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot. Over the course of their long relationship, Eliot wrote her more than 1,100 letters, a correspondence that was embargoed until 2020. I titled my book “The Silenced Muse” because Eliot acknowledged that after his second marriage, he arranged for virtually all of Hale’s side of the correspondence to be destroyed.

Q: How did you come to her story?

A: In college at the University of Michigan, I was a student of history, not English literature. For a long time, I’ve been a member of a women’s group that meets monthly to discuss a topic of the hostess’s choosing. Back in 2015, our hostess said she would like us to read and discuss one of her favorite poems, “Burnt Norton,”  the first of Eliot’s  “Four Quartets.” I was unfamiliar with the poem, so I turned to the Internet to read it and learn more about it.

The Wikipedia entry explained that Burnt Norton was an abandoned manor home in the Cotswolds of England that Eliot and Hale had visited in the mid-1930s. The entry also said that some thought Eliot would have married Hale if he had not been married to someone else. I knew something of Eliot’s two wives, but had never heard about Emily Hale. As I dug a little deeper, I learned about their extensive correspondence, and that it was scheduled to be opened within five years.

Q: You also wrote a novel about her life before you had full access to her papers [The Poet’s Girl, published in 2020]. . How did you make the mental adjustment to go from fiction to nonfiction? What did you learn that went against what you had imagined?

A: When I began working on my biography, I repeatedly had to ask myself, “Did I turn that up in my research or did I make it up?” Since I did not have to manage footnotes, it was sometimes hard to remember! When I wrote my novel, I had to fill in many gaps in the romantic relationship between Eliot and Hale. I tried, however, to hew as closely as I could to what was known about both of their lives. I wanted their interactions to be both possible and plausible, based on the known record.

Looking back, I can identify at least two major errors in my novel. Eliot later told Hale that he had fallen in love with her in 1913 when they had rehearsed a skit for a night of performances at the home of his cousin. Before he left Boston for a year’s study at Oxford, he told Hale he was in love with her. I had portrayed Hale as being immediately attracted to Eliot when they had met, and working to draw him out of his shell. But when the letters were opened, I learned that she was surprised and embarrassed when Eliot declared he was in love with her. I think she had been too busy pursuing her amateur theatrical interests to take note of his bumbling attempts at courtship. Still, she was interested in Eliot, and figured she would wait and see what happened when he returned from England. Instead he surprised his friends and family by impetuously marrying an Englishwoman. But Hale did not seem to pine away for Eliot in those early years, the way I depicted her in my novel.

The second major error was how I described what happened when they visited Burnt Norton. I tried to make it a very romantic, intimate encounter. It seems, however, that the outing inspired Eliot more than it did Hale. She was preoccupied with other concerns. Later, she remembered the nights they had spent in the garden behind the home where they were staying as the more memorable times. Although Eliot told her that “Burnt Norton” was his love poem to her, I think she was mystified that he considered it an expression of his love.

Q: On that note, can you talk your first encounter with these letters you had always heard about?

A: It was a day I will never forget. The Princeton University Library had announced it would make the letters available on a first-come, first-served basis on January 2, 2020. There were about six of us who showed up before the library opened, and I was fourth in line. Because of restrictions negotiated by the Eliot estate, we could not make copies of the letters; we had to transcribe whatever information we wanted to keep. I got the last spot at the three computers where the complete digital file of the letters could be accessed. It was exciting to dig in to them, alongside other Eliot scholars who had, in some cases, waited decades to read the letters.

Later in the morning, we were surprised to learn that in 1960 Eliot had sent the Harvard Library a secret letter, with instructions that it be opened the day that his letters to Hale became public. In this letter, he denied that he had ever loved her, and laid out a long list of complaints about her. It was hard to reconcile that letter with the earlier letters we were reading. While we concluded that Eliot wrote the letter in case his wife was still alive when the letters to Hale became public—she wasn’t—his letter only served to draw more attention to Hale’s letters. In the middle of the #metoo movement, most major U.S. news outlets wrote stories about the two versions of the love story.

Q: Early in their correspondence, Hale and Eliot were already discussing what would become of their letters. How do you think the fact that they knew others would read their letters affect what they wrote to each other?

A: Eliot urged Hale not to write to him as if someone else would be reading the letters. Since Eliot destroyed most of her side of the correspondence, we can’t judge whether she followed those instructions. But when Eliot first wrote about wanting to preserve the letters, as a sort of monument to his love for her, she seemed to express concern about sharing their most intimate thoughts. She suggested that they might want to ask trusted scholars to review the letters to preserve only those parts that would be of interest to fellow scholars of English literature. Actually,  because Eliot wrote so freely to Hale about so many things, I think scholars are finding everything in the letters to be very interesting.

In 1956, after their relationship changed and they became simply old friends, Eliot became concerned about how long the letters would be embargoed. He told Hale that he was not concerned about his expressions of love to her; rather, he was concerned about the nasty things he had said about many people, including friends and family members. His concerns seemed to have been exacerbated when he was able to read the correspondence of James Joyce on microfilm. At the time, Hale had no inkling that Eliot was planning to get married, and in retrospect, it appears that he did what he could to ensure that his much-younger second wife would never be able to see the letters.

Q: Hale had a tough time finding jobs that were satisfying and supported her. Where do you think she flourished the most?

A: Hale’s teaching career was hampered because she had never earned a college degree. She seemed happiest when she was acting and directing plays, and one of her longtime supervisors said that while she was a gifted teacher and director, she was a more talented director. Hale’s father died when she was 26 and her mother was institutionalized when she was 5. She had no surviving siblings. While she spent a good deal of time with an aunt and uncle, I think school drama clubs and theater groups provided her with the kind of close family she lacked for much of her life.

Q: What useful research advice did you get along the way (or maybe that you figured out yourself) that you can pass on to others?

A: Searchable online newspapers have become an invaluable resource, and new papers are continuing to be added to these data bases. Many are from small towns whose papers might otherwise be ignored. They opened up a lot of information to me about Hale’s theatrical and college careers. But there are still some geographical gaps in my research where the newspapers are not yet online. Because of my journalism background, I also tried to evaluate the nature of the newspaper stories and their accuracy. Did it read like a press release that was published verbatim? Was a theatrical review really written by a critic? Because Hale taught at schools and colleges, I also was able to review and search yearbooks and other school publications that are now available online.

The other resource I came to appreciate were the archivists and historians at libraries and museums—some of them working as volunteers. Big research libraries are often backlogged with requests, and that was particularly the case during the Covid pandemic, when I began doing additional research for my biography. But some of these people helped to research very specific questions for me. I think they liked to be asked, and to feel they are contributing to a project. I’m the kind of person who just likes to dig in and do it myself. I probably could have made even better use of some of these people if I had asked for more help at the start.

Q: What about tips for writing or re-writing?

A: I do a lot of editing of my work. I try to put space between my writing and my editing because I think slightly different parts of the brain are engaged in that task. It makes it easier to review what I have written with a more critical eye.

As I worked on my biography, I told myself I was going to try to capture everything that I turned up, in part because I was also spinning off essays for academic journals and knew that I might be able to use the information elsewhere, even if I did not keep it in my book. But by the time my manuscript was sold, it was twice as long as the length that had been proposed to the publisher. (And Emily Hale was never going to qualify for a biography the length of Sylvia Plath’s or Alexander Hamilton’s!) Trimming the manuscript at that point was very painful, and to a certain extent, I think it impacted the pacing of the book. I also realized that as I tried to emphasize the new factual material I had uncovered, I short-changed some of the “color” of my novel—i.e., extended descriptions of settings and key characters. With a bit more word count, I might have expanded on those kinds of elements.

While everyone wants her book to be a best-seller, my much more realistic goal is to become a footnote in someone else’s book!

Q: Anything else to add?

A: In the four books I have published since 2011, I have been attracted to the stories of women who led interesting and important lives, but are not well known. It has been very satisfying to research and write their stories, but it can also be a challenge to get them published and reviewed. I’m pleased that there are more secondary outlets (like the one you provide!) to help get these books in front of the reading public.

You can read more from Sara on her website. Purchase The Silenced Muse through Bookshop.org, Amazon, or other booksellers.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of Jacobs’s life and era, they delved into the Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, as well as works by and about many of her contemporaries. In 2022, they published the translation with the Tamil publishing house Kalachuvadu (which means “time’s footprints”).

This year, Nithya and Kamala put together a pilgrimage to visit significant places in Harriet Jacobs’s life, including Edenton, North Carolina, and New York. Their route brought them to Alexandria, about halfway in between. (Nithya has put together an account of the pilgrimage, please read it here.)

Nithya contacted the Alexandria Historical Society. As a board member, the email was forwarded to me. I’ve written about Jacobs’s work as a relief agent in Civil War Alexandria and am always happy to talk about it! When I offered to show them around, however, I had to figure out how to map out a two-hour walking tour. For logistics reasons, we skipped a few significant places and I added a few less significant stops that happened to be on our route from the Lyceum on South Washington Street down to the Potomac River and back up. Two other AHS board members joined and shared their Alexandria history stories, too.

Stop 1: Lyceum

The Lyceum, now a history museum and event space, was built before the Civil War as a place where (mostly white men) gathered for cultural edification. The Army turned it into a hospital during the war. We started here to talk about Alexandria’s involvement in the Civil War, including the city becoming a safe(ish) haven for African Americans escaping slavery.

In December 1862, Harriet Jacobs wrote her friend Amy Post:

I expect to go to Washington next month to remain through the winter. My health is better than it has been for years. The good God has spared me for this work, and the last six months has been the happiest of all my life. Sometimes my sky is darkened, but my faith in the omnipotent is strong.

Stop 2: Washington and Wolfe Street Building

Harriet Jacobs worked in Alexandria from 1863 to 1865 and spent a lot of time at a duplex near the corner of Washington and Wolfe Streets. She and fellow relief agent Julia Wilbur set up a clothing room. They lived upstairs at different times. The building at various times held a small hospital, classrooms, and living quarters for freedpeople and some of the Northerners who came to work with them. (Below, 1865, & now, as we peered into the south side of the building in what I believe was the clothing room.)

Journalist Ulysses S. Ward wrote about their work in the New York Post on April 29, 1863:

Many evidences were gathered from the testimony of Mrs. Jacobs, who was sent here by philanthropic friends in New York, and from Miss Wilbur, who represents a charitable association in Rochester. It will give great satisfaction to many persons who have interested themselves in the humane cause, to know that their gifts of clothing and utter and other articles have been as judiciously applied as they were imperatively needed. These two ladies have been energetically occupied in the self sacrificing work.

Stop 3: Alexandria Academy

We crossed Washington Street and headed down Wolfe. We stopped at the Alexandria Academy, which had been a school endowed by George Washington. It was used basically to warehouse the first freedpeople coming into Alexandria in 1861 and 1862. Jacobs visited Alexandria and Washington in the summer of 1862 and reported on the conditions in a long article for the abolitionist Liberator newsletter:

Another place, the old school house in Alexandria, is the Government headquarters for the women. This I thought the most wretched of all the places. Anyone who can find an apology for slavery should visit this place.

 Stop 4: Military Governor’s Office

On St. Asaph’s Street, we walked by the house where Marquis de Lafayette stayed when he returned to America in 1824 (i.e., one of the places not connected to HJ, but en route). A more relevant stop was the office used by Brig. Gen. John Potts Slough. As Military Governor, Slough was in charge of “occupied Alexandria.” He was known as hot-headed and domineering, but had a lot of power over everyday life so could not be ignored.

Julia Wilbur wrote about the first time that she and Jacobs had to confront Slough (to appeal a decision to house healthy orphans at a smallpox hospital):

Mrs. Jacobs and I have been very much tried of late. Did I tell you in my last that Doctor Bigelow says he means to take all the orphans to the smallpox hospital? Of course Mrs. J feels as indignant as I do. I told her that I had concluded that it was not my duty to remain quiet and see this outrage go on. So last Saturday, for the first time, we called on General Slough. Mrs. J asked him if we might gather all the little orphans and put them in a room at the barracks, and we could employ a woman to take care of them. He said yes, it was a very laudable object….

My friend this was really a great undertaking for us. We are in such a state of nervous excitement that we were all of the trouble and we had such a headache too. Mrs. Jacobs spoke very handsomely to him and when pleading for these children said she “I have been a slave myself.” He is a very reserved and unapproachable man, but he listened to us quite as kindly as we expected and we obtained all we asked for….

Stop 5: Athenaeum/Commissary

What is now the center for the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association was a bank before the Civil War and the Commissary during it. We had been hearing bagpipes as we approached it, and it turned out that a funeral was beginning in its main salon. So we did not stop but instead walked down Prince Street to the Potomac River. The lower part of Prince Street remains cobble-stoned. Ignoring the cars, you get a sense of the scene at the time.

Stop 6: Potomac River

The river served as our walking tour halfway point. It is the raison d’etre for the city—from shipping out tobacco to trafficking in enslaved people to serving as a logistics center during the Civil War. Jacobs would have been down here often. Several neighborhoods of freedpeople grew up nearby. She took the ferry across to Washington. It would not have had the pleasant walkways, etc., of today, but our little group (our visitors, me, and two other board members of the Alexandria Historical Society) stopped for a group portrait.

I also shared an excerpt from George Alfred Townsend, a New York Herald journalist:

Alexandria is filled with ruined people; they walk as strangers through their ancient streets, and their property is no longer theirs to possess…[Alexandria] has become essentially a military city. Its streets, its docks, its warehouses, its dwellings, and its suburbs have been absorbed to the thousand uses of war.

Stop 7: Market Square/Marshall House

Heading up King Street, I pointed out the Marshall House, where Elmer Ellsworth and James Jackson were sequentially killed as the first martyrs of the Civil War. Market Square was quiet on a Monday mid-morning but we tried to conjure up the space as a bustling place of trade and social networking.

Stop 8: Provost Marshall and Look Toward School

Harriet Jacobs had frequent dealings with the Provost Marshal, the office under General Slough with the most direct dealings with freed people. When I see the photo below, I think of her and Julia Wilbur, two civilian women, having to cross this gauntlet of hangers-on at the entrance!

The site of Harriet Jacobs’s school is about four blocks to the north of King Street, corner of Pitt and Oronoco Streets. With no indication, not even a marker, we forewent the trek, as we were running out of time and it was getting hot. But here is a wonderful photo of the school. An “x” was placed under Jacobs image; the photo was used for fundraising.

Virtual Stop 9: Slave Pen/Freedmen’s Barracks/L’Ouverture Hospital

There was time only to share photos and a few stories about the Slave Pen (the former Franklin & Armfield slave-trading business, now Freedom House Museum), as well as the site of barracks built for freedpeople (built in 1863, torn down in 1865) and a hospital built for U.S. Colored Troops patients (built in 1864, torn down in 1866). They will have to return for a visit. The area is about half-mile west of the Lyceum.

I shared an excerpt from an article in the Anglo-African that described Jacobs’s leadership and speech at L’Ouverture Hospital on August 1, 1864. She organized a ceremony to honor emancipation in the British West Indies in 1834. Before there was emancipation in the United States to celebrate, Black communities in the North marked the day.

The presentation by Mrs. Jacobs was admirably done, calm and unassuming (the peculiar characteristic of this estimable lady), she came forward and presented to Doctor Barker a fine flag, accompanied by these remarks….

Physician, soldiers and friends, for the first time in Alexandria we have met to celebrate a day made historical to our race, the day of British West Indies, India emancipation. Three years ago, this flag had no significance for you and we could not cherish it as our emblem of freedom. You then had no part in the bloody struggle for your country. Your patriotism was spurned but today you were in arms for the freedom of your race and defence of your country. Today this flag is significant to you soldiers who have made it the symbol of freedom for the slave. Unfurl it, stand by it, and fight for it, until the breeze upon which it float shall be so pure that a slave cannot breathe its air.

Virtual Stop 10: Contraband and Freedman Cemetery Memorial

Likewise, since it is about a mile south, I only pointed in the direction of the former “contraband’s cemetery,” which was rediscovered in the 1990s and rededicated in 2014. A passage by Harriet Jacobs about a funeral she attended are etched on one of the beautiful bronzes at the memorial:

I have just witnessed a novel and solemn scene, a funeral in the open air. The deceased Peter Washington was an old man and a slave until the breaking out of the war. He had lived in the house with us and was a missionary among the freedmen and was ordered to do the work to which he considered God had especially appointed him to, his zeal was unwearied. At all times, in sunshine and storm, he might have been wending his way to some home where affliction had fallen, or to the House of worship, where the people listened with rapt attention to his quaint, earnest utterances.

We returned to the Lyceum in time for Nithya and Kamala to head into Washington to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Kamala showed me her translated version of Incidents.

I met Katie Bowler Young at a workshop at the National Academy of Sciences. When she posed a question to one of the speakers, she mentioned that she wrote a biography. During a break, I asked her about this aspect of her life. (She was there in her professional capacity with RTI International.) I learned that she wrote a biography of Mexican sculptor Enrique Alférez, in addition to writing poetry and fiction.

After the meeting, we emailed back and forth a bit. As you’ll read below, she told me about Alférez’s life and art; her process to research, write, and select images for the book Enrique Alférez, Sculptor; and her tips about writing amidst holding down a full-time job and raising a family.

Q: For people like me unfamiliar with your subject, who was Enrique Alférez?

Enrique Alférez was a 20th-century Mexican sculptor who helped shape the visual landscape of New Orleans. He was born in Zacatecas in 1903. After service in the Mexican Revolution as a youth, he emigrated to El Paso; studied in Chicago, where he contributed to art deco architecture; and, in 1929, made his way to Louisiana.

For nearly 70 years, he lived and worked in New Orleans. His lasting imprint is seen among figurative sculptures, monuments, fountains, and architectural details from the Central Business District to the Lakefront Airport and beyond. He was drawn to the human figure, to the female figure in particular, and he worked across many mediums. He wanted to present human emotion in his sculpture.

By the time of his death in 1999, he had become the most celebrated sculptor in New Orleans. In my writing about him, I make connections between Alférez’s art and homeland, international outlook, and Indigenous Nahua heritage.

Q: Where can you see his art in New Orleans today? Are residents aware of who he was and how widespread his work is throughout the city—and sometimes controversial?

Q: Alférez gained agency as an artist early in his career in the city, most notably his contributions to City Park. The park underwent an expansion and revitalization in the 1930s under the WPA (the Works Progress Administration, renamed the Works Project Administration), and Alférez was hired as lead sculptor. His influence on the park is extensive: architectural detail on bridges, fountains, figurative sculpture. The park grounds include the New Orleans Museum of Art and the New Orleans Botanical Garden, which is home to the Helis Foundation Enrique Alférez Garden today, with an extensive collection of his figurative sculpture, several of which have been donated or loaned by community members. While the city widely celebrates his influence, he isn’t as well-known as he should be outside of New Orleans. 

How he was received varied across time and geography. His work was met with controversy on multiple occasions, including around the design of a bridge wing wall in City Park, on which he represented people who worked at the park. He included Black figures at a time when people of color were banned by White society from enjoying the park, a restriction that remained in effect until 1958. When he received blowback to including the figures, he insisted that he was representing those who indeed worked there, and who he worked alongside of. He rebelled against racist social constructs and created art that reflected the public more broadly. His making monuments to the people who built City Park was a radical act at the time.

Q: What drew you to write his biography?

A: When I was a student at the University of New Orleans in the mid-1990s, I was going through a very difficult time. Alférez’s Fountain of the Four Winds was close to campus, and I would go there in between classes for solitude. Even by then, the fountain was decaying. Little by little, though, I wondered how it had gotten there, and its story. I made note of the marker that said Enrique Alférez and returned to the university library to learn more about him. Over the following decades, I collected material – recordings of interviews, ephemera, news clippings – but didn’t set out to write his biography. My writing life took more shape over those years, too.

I mentioned my material to an editor at the Historic New Orleans Collection, and she asked what I was doing with it. When I responded that I was collecting it, she said, “But you’re a writer!” This led to discussions with the Collection, and ultimately to a contract to write Alférez’s biography.

Q: Talking to his daughter Tlaloc in New Orleans and Mexico sounds amazing. When in your research journey did you meet her and how did it help you write about her father’s life?

I met Tlaloc Alférez after committing to write the biography. Because I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I initially reached out by phone and then sent her a letter by mail. The moment she invited me over the threshold of her home is one of the most remarkable moments in my life: I was immediately surrounded by more of Alférez’s figurative sculpture and drawings than I had ever seen at once.

 Tlaloc provided unrestricted access to the family papers and has shared countless hours talking about her father’s art—which was her family’s work. She arranged for my visit to their family home in Morelia. She has been instrumental in preserving her father’s work and in my ability to write this biography.

Q: Did you record the conversations? How was she involved in writing the text and/or selecting photographs?

I recorded many conversations with interview subjects, including Tlaloc and other contemporaries of Alférez. Tlaloc did not have an editorial role in my book—there was independence in writing and selecting images. One of the unexpected experiences I had when researching was sharing details of Tlaloc’s father’s life with her that she did not know.

Q: His wife Peggy was a force of nature, and died tragically because of nature, Hurricane Katrina. How did you come to realize her important role in Alferez’s legacy?

A: I was aware of Peggy’s influence before I met Tlaloc, because she had a key role in managing Alférez’s business and therefore appeared in interviews and other research materials. But when Tlaloc provided access to her family papers, I recognized Peggy’s awareness of the importance of preserving records. The family papers were primarily Peggy’s papers. I’m confident she knew they would be meaningful to researchers in the years to come. She saved everything: library cards, receipts for raw materials, guest books at exhibitions, correspondence, photographs. These papers need professional archiving today.

Peggy didn’t evacuate for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The night before the storm, she shuttled Alférez’s artwork away from windows and to higher ground, and by morning she had collapsed beside her bed. She never recovered, and I believe she died as she lived her life, protecting her husband’s legacy and art.

Q: About your process for researching—what was most surprising in your search? Any obstacles and how did you work around them?

A: There were so many types of surprises.

Factual surprises, such as finding documentation of Alférez’s birth year, contradicting many published accounts, and his immigration record, which contradicted his public accounts about his interest in becoming a naturalized citizen (he spoke of one attempt but there were several).

Personal surprises, such as the joy of connecting with Alférez’s contemporaries like Jack Davis. I had known of Jack as a journalist who interviewed Alférez, and I enjoyed meeting him and learning more about his enduring friendship with Alférez. The network of people I met, who gave generously of their time, was an essential part of the research. Frankly, it also made my life more interesting.

One of the other surprises was how I questioned the value of information: whether it should or needs to be revealed, why or why not, when if so, and so on. These questions are essential drivers of a biography and have shaped my writing in other genres too, including poetry and fiction.

Q: Related to the photographs in the book---a wonderful array of him and of his work. Was it always the plan to make this a larger sized book and include so many images? How did you and/or the publisher decide what to include?

A: As I researched, I identified specific images I wanted to use in the book, as well as bodies of images that I wanted to draw from. When we neared the design stage, I shared these images with the publisher and we began a process of determining permissions, quality of image available, and so on. Editor Dorothy Ball, designer Alison Cody, and I also had several discussions about principles of the book, which carried from the text through to the design. Alison researched and found some remarkable photos, and she was invaluable in coordinating permissions from archives, museums, and other organizations.

Q: On your website you note that you set aside a weekday evening and weekend morning for non-professional writing. All of us who have “other” jobs try to figure out the best way to be creative and productive. How do you make that work?

A: The practice of my writing life has changed over the decades, but the discipline I developed when my daughters were toddlers has continued. At the time, I was working full-time, going to graduate school full-time, and juggling commitments to family. I designed a schedule that arranged my writing into the times of day that I have been most effective at these tasks; reading, for example, in the evenings, and writing early in the morning; using weekend mornings for writing and revising.

One of the newest patterns to emerge is that once a month I meet a writer friend in a coffee shop on a weekend morning and we dedicate a few hours to writing administration. We begin the conversation with our goal for the day – submissions, revisions, creating packets to draw from for submissions, file organization, and so on – and then work quietly and independently in a place that’s a center of activity in our community. We wrap up the morning describing our accomplishments to each other. In the weeks leading up to our work session, I start planning for the tasks I want to accomplish. Having that end-goal in mind applies to larger projects too and helps me stay focused on the milestones to get there.

Q: The inevitable question--What are you working on now?

A: I have three manuscripts in development: a poetry collection that’s nearing completion, focusing on the effects of incarceration on families; a collection of short stories set in a fictional town in southern Louisiana; and a novel. I don’t think I would have considered writing a novel if it hadn’t been for the experience of writing Alférez’s biography, when I needed to understand the many places and times in which he lived, over the course of nearly a century.

As the biography was going to press, I had a conversation with playwright and writer Kira Obolensky about the experience of containing so much time and place in one manuscript. She introduced me to Elinor Fuch’s essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” about world-building in theater, and this started driving my interest in containing a more complex set of storylines on a single stage, so to speak. My novel spreads across three generations in one family and four in another, as their lives intersect in brief but consequential ways over the course of seventy-five years. Writing the biography became a step in being able to imagine this much time and place in one story.

The Historic New Orleans Collection is a museum, research center, and publisher in the French Quarter that is open to the public. As one example of Alférez’s legacy in New Orleans, the Helis Foundation’s outdoor music series, held at the New Orleans Botanical Garden in City Park, is called “Evenings with Enrique.”

You can read more about Enrique Alférez, Sculptor and Katie Bowler Young’s poetry and other work on her website.

Ted Pulliam is a well-known figure in Alexandria’s history community. As you’ll read below, after a few forays into fiction and poetry, he found his calling as a researcher and writer about the place he has called home since 1980.

We volunteer together on the Alexandria Archaeological Commission. He has served on numerous other history-related boards and committees. Most recently, he was a member of a committee that created the African American Heritage Trail, a walking route with an online StoryMap and physical signage.

In September 2023, The History Press published his book True Tales of Old Alexandria. It is a series of unconnected chapters that begin with the story of an indentured British boy who was traded to the Powhatan tribe (one of my favorite chapters for new and incredible information) and ends with the history and recent discoveries at Robinson Landing near the Potomac River.

I asked Ted about the book and his other research and writing projects.

Q: How did True Tales come to be?

 A: The book consists of eleven articles that I wrote over several years going back to the mid-1990s. I gathered the articles together in mid-summer 2022 after the class notes editor for my college’s alumni magazine called me, as he had called other members of my class, to find out what I had been doing lately. In our class notes in the next issue, he wrote that he had googled my name, found my articles, and recommended that others google me also.

Surprised, I also googled my name and found several of my articles scattered about the web. I decided to assemble some of them into a book. I knew Michael Lee Pope, a writer for the Gazette Packet, had done much the same thing for The History Press. I sent them a query letter and later a manuscript. In late September of this year, they published the book.

Q: You make it sound easy. Given all you have written, how did you decide which chapters/topics to include?

A: I generally looked for the articles that told stories I thought would be the most interesting to the most people in Alexandria. I rejected a couple that seemed to be too narrowly focused and maybe too technical, such as one on the names and types of all the ships that transported General Edward Braddock’s troops from Great Britain to Alexandria at the beginning of the French and Indian War.

I choose subjects based on various things, such as timeliness and my interests. For example, the chapter on the British looting of Alexandria in 1814 during the War of 1812 consists of several short articles that were published in the Alexandria Gazette Packet in 2014, the 200th anniversary of the event. The chapter on the slavery-era Black Codes, about a 14-year-old free black girl arrested in 1837 while walking down a street in Washington without her freedom papers, was based on research I found while looking for something else. The chapter on the history of the U.S. horse cavalry between World War I and World War II is centered around 40 VMI cadets who, in 1930, were training at Fort Myer. One of those cadets was my father. 

Q: If you could be a “fly on the wall” to learn more about one story in your book, which would it be?

A: It would be an episode in the story about the day the Civil War came to Alexandria, the day after Virginia seceded on May 23, 1861. [NOTE: Chapter 7 in the book]. It is not, however, the usual story about Col. Elmer Ellsworth taking down the Confederate flag from the top of the Marshall House hotel. Another Union army contingent came to Alexandria that day. They ended up at 1315 Duke Street, the headquarters of a dealer in enslaved people [NOTE: currently operating as Freedom House, a city museum].

The leader of that contingent, Col. Orlando Wilcox, later related that his Michigan soldiers said that they had found three enslaved people imprisoned there: a man, a girl, and a boy. According to Wilcox, “a well-dressed gentleman came to ‘claim his property,’ the negro man whom he grabbed by the collar and attempted to take with.”  Instead, the Michigan soldiers threw out the “gentleman” and freed the three people. Although Wilcox tells something about what happened to the man, I would like to know more about who the Alexandria “gentleman” was, who the three prisoners were, what became of all of them, and what the Michigan soldiers thought about what they found and what they did. 

Q: How do you organize your research when it spans so many different periods and events?

A: I keep research files in hardcopy in looseleaf binders labeled by general subject. I also have binders for subheadings if needed. My basement is full of these binders. I generally don’t take notes by hand becuase my handwriting is such that I have trouble reading it after much time has passed. Instead, I print out the pages of a document or book I found on the Internet that are of interest. If the information is at a library, I use the library’s copier or occasionally photograph pages with a cell phone.  Then I place the pages in a subject binder and highlight the parts of the pages I want to quote or look at again when writing.

As for newspapers, some old newspapers are on free, online sites, such as the Virginia Gazette on the Colonial Williamsburg site. Others are available through subscription sites, such as newspapers.com.  The Alexandria Gazette, by its various names, is available on microfilm in the Local History/Special Collections branch of the Alexandria Library. [NOTE: It is also online through the Arlington County library at no cost.]

Q: Your basement must be something else. So when and how did you first get into writing about Alexandria history?

A: I wanted to be a writer, and of course, write a novel. I realized that might be a little ambitious to start with, so I took classes at the Writers Center in Bethesda on short story writing. I quickly learned that I didn’t have enough imagination to do even short stories, much less novels. Also, I didn’t really believe in what I was writing because I knew I had made it up (that should have been a hint that maybe I ought to write history). Then I tried poetry with more classes at Bethesda.  Poetry, however, was too introspective, and too hard. Finally, I took a course on feature writing, short pieces for newspapers and magazines.

At that time, in the late 1990s, as I looked for something to write about, I was traveling to work in the District from the Braddock Road Metro station. I knew that a British general named Braddock had been massacred early in the French and Indian War. I also had heard that the road was named after him, but what exactly was his connection with Alexandria? I did some research, wrote up what I found, and submitted it to the Washington Post for a separate section on history and science called “Horizon” the Post had then. I was delighted when the Post accepted it. Before it was published, however, the Post discontinued publication of “Horizon” and thus axed my article. Although that was extremely disappointing, the experience with Braddock began my interest in Alexandria history. I started volunteering at the Alexandria Archaeology Museum and began learning and writing about more of Alexandria’s stories, and some of them were published. The Braddock piece finally was published in American History magazine in 2005.

Q: A good lesson in finding solutions in different ways! How do you see the research and writing about the city’s history has changed since you first got involved?

 A: The main change has been that coverage of Alexandria’s African American history has greatly increased. When I began writing about Alexandria history in the late 1990s, the city seemed to concentrate on its colonial and Civil War history.

The Black History Museum and the African American Heritage Park had been established, but they have since been followed by numerous other city sites and activities: establishment of Contrabands and Freedom Cemetery, purchase and renovation of the Freedom House Museum, founding of the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project, development of the Alexandria African American Waterfront Heritage Trails, and archaeological exploration of the Fort Ward post-Civil-War Black neighborhood, plus the commemoration of several events in Alexandria’s African American history and the preparation of numerous studies and books on other aspects of the city’s African American history. 

 Q: What is your favorite historic place to visit in Alexandria or nearby?

 A: Probably my favorite historic place is the waterfront block between Duke and Wolfe Streets that now is Robinson Landing. A chapter in the book tells the history of this block. I wrote an early version of that chapter in the summer of 2006. Then-City Archaeologist Pam Cressey had foreseen the city’s development and the need for preparation of the waterfront’s history. That summer she assigned several college interns and me each a block on the waterfront to research. My assignment, the block between Duke and Wolfe, was the site of Robinson Terminal Warehouse Company, where ocean-going ships periodically docked to unload huge rolls of newsprint the size of SUVs for the Washington Post and other papers.

A year later I expanded my research and published a rewritten report in the Alexandria Historical Society’s Alexandria Chronicle. I occasionally revisited the site to watch the ships unload. When the site was being developed, some of my research was used in archaeological and historical reports. The property itself became particularly interesting when the foundations of one of the warehouses I had written about was uncovered, plus the foundations of other buildings and the remains of three old sailing ships.

I still visit the block and see on the pavement the outline of the original point of land that was there before Alexandria existed and the traces of later shorelines. The wharf where the ocean-going ships used to dock is still there, much reconditioned.

 Q: I know you are working on another book now. What is that one about and what are the plans for publication?

A: The book is titled Here’s a Letter from Thy Dear Son, taken from a line in one of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems. It is composed of some 200 letters written before, during, and after the Civil War that I edited and annotated. The letters were written by a Georgia farming family of modest means. Th men served in the Confederate army and wrote home about their experiences, while the mother, wives, and sisters recorded their own disruptions and hardships. It is scheduled for publication in January 2024 by Mercer University Press, although it may be delayed because of some issues I had with the index.

You can purchase Tall Tales of Old Alexandria in gift shops of museums and visitors centers in Alexandria, or online. He is also lining up book talks, including one for the Alexandria Historical Society in March 2024.

To start out transparently, I support re-naming, as you will read below. I live in the West End of the city, where most of this issue is now playing out. Ironically, I live on one of the few streets with a Union-related name—Fort Williams Parkway, because of its proximity to one of the forts built as part of the Civil War defenses of Washington.

The Streets in Question

Alexandria is noted for its 18th century waterfront and for history-making residents that included George Washington and Robert E. Lee. However, as I noted above, most of the streets with clear provenance to Confederate leaders are in the West End.

When the West End was annexed by Alexandria from Fairfax County in 1952, it almost doubled the area of the city, which is still less than 16 square miles. The post-World War II building boom added subdivisions, high-rise and garden apartments, shopping centers, the hospital, and more development to what was a more rural area.

 In 1953, the Jim Crow-segregated City Council dealt with the large numbers of streets in the jurisdiction with Ordinance 769. The ordinance covered the system of street numbering and the duties of the city manager. It also “relates to naming of streets.” It said, in part:

In the area west of Quaker Lane, an alphabetical progression of names shall be instituted [NOTE: I have never picked up on this so-called alphabetical progression despite living here for 40 years]….

Streets running in a generally east-west direction shall bear names of persons or places prominent in American History; streets running in a generally north-south direction shall, insofar as possible, bear the names of Confederate military leaders.

About 55 street names were explicitly dictated in the ordinance, although not all took on Confederate names. But, Valley Lane became Pickett Street and Pegram Lane at different points; Walter Reed Drive became Beauregard Street, etc.

As for the “public comment” forget about it! The Ordinance stated:

As soon as practicable after the passing of this ordinance, the Director of Planning shall notify in writing the owners of all property having frontage on any of street listed in (b) above, of the change, and this notice shall set forth the old name, the new name, and the effective date of the change.

Going forward, the Ordinance continued:

Effective on the passing of this ordinance, the City Planning Commission is hereby empowered to assign names to all newly acquired or dedicated streets in accordance with the provision of (d).          

Who Knew?

Fast forward to now. The city has mostly changed for the good. The statue of a Confederate soldier, back to Washington and face to Richmond, has come down (a whole other story, found https://here).

With the exception of Jefferson Davis Highway (the section of Route 1 that passes through Alexandria, even though not in the West End) and possibly Beauregard Street, most Alexandrians did not/do not know the origins of most of these street names. I did not, especially for smaller streets (Breckinridge Place), more obscure officers (Imboden Street), or those with common names that could have honored any one of many people (Jordan Street, Stevenson Avenue). Most were generals in the army of the Confederate States of America. I did know and shudder about Taney Street, named for Roger Taney, who was the Supreme Court Chief Justice who led the majority in the 1857 Dred Scott decision.

But once you know who the people were and when/why they were honored, it is hard not to know.

Street Naming Process Now

After many years of discussion and procrastination, the city announced a process to change the names in January 2023, three streets a year (not exactly a jackrabbit pace but “to be deliberate and efficient with resources”).

The Historic Alexandria Resources Commission, a volunteer body, was

requested to develop a list, with the support of the Office of Historic Alexandria, of individuals and locations, worthy of honor by the City. The Commission is requested to pay special atenton to inclusion of women and minorites (as well as events and locations significant to women and minorities throughout our history), who have frequently been overlooked through history.

A HARC member asked me to provide background on Julia Wilbur and Harriet Jacobs. Jacobs made it to the list of potential honorees. The final list consisted of individuals, groups, and concepts.

Several surveys and public hearings were held. A three-person City Council subcommittee submitted its recommendation to the full City Council in September 2023 about the first streets to be considered.

Public Hearing: November 30, 2023

At the end of November 2023, the Naming Committee held a public hearing on the first six to be considered, with the idea the proces might guide the future: Breckinridge Place, Frost Street, Early Street, Jordan Street, Jordan Court, and Forrest Street. First, a city employee reported on the public response through social media engagement, surveys, and other interactions. The response was split, but without huge participation (again, a whole other question on the notion of participatory democracy).

Given the tenor of a few letters to the editor in our local weekly papers questioning the worth of changing the names, I decided to testify in support of the re-naming and filled out the necessary online form to do do so.

Most of the opponents lived on one of the targeted streets—Early Street, named after Gen. Jubal Early (described in Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels as “a dark, cold, icy man, bitter, alone”). There are currrently both North Early and South Early streets, although they are separated by several miles. About ten North Early residents spoke against the change. They all said something along the lines of assuming their street was named “early, as in not late.” They spoke of the time, money, and hassle to change addresses on their documents. Several residents spoke of their emotional attachment to the name of the street where they grew up and raised families.

A resident of Jordan Street came with a petition from people on the street to re-name that street for Thomasina Jordan, who fought for the rights of Virginia’s American Indian tribes.

I get their point. Finding other people with the same surname, and publicly explaining who they were, could be a win-win.

I am less sympathetic to those who stated their opposition because the name changes would erase history (isn’t that what happened in the 1950s?) or the city has more important things to do. My testimony, delivered via Zoom, was as follows:

Here is most of the audio (I did not appear on screen):

Honorable City Council Members:

 My name is Paula Whitacre, and I am a long-time resident of the West End. I would like to publicly support the re-naming of streets that currently honor Confederate military leaders.

 As I have learned from research into the history of the city, Alexandria’s white, male adults—the only people who could legally vote at that time—voted on May 23, 1861 to approve the Virginia Ordinance of Secession. Specifically, they voted to—quote-- “repeal the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America by the State of Virginia”—end quote. Turning your back on the U.S. Constitution does not seem worthy of being honored.

I do not need to take the time to relate the background of those whose names are commemorated or to reiterate how and when these individuals were chosen, as this is readily available online.

But I do question why we continue to celebrate this twisted memory in the 21st century.

I have heard the argument that the city has more important things to deal with. This is true, but the name-changing is not an either/or proposition. Of course, we should be dealing with other issues, including those related to inequality, bias, and the overall well-being of our city. Name-changing is only one part of this larger work. But it is a start.

Thank you.

 Next Steps

The committee will make its recommendation to the City Council in January 2024. 

Wearing my billable hat, I usually do freelance work for organizations. During COVID, however, I took on a very different assignment. I worked with Samira Meghdessian, who had translated a book written by her uncle, Joseph Cadora, a former mayor of Ramallah, Palestine. He wrote a book in the 1950s about the history of his beloved city. Samira spent several years translating the book from Arabic into English, with some guidance from her cousin Fred (Joseph’s son), a professor of Semitic Languages. She extensively annotated the text  to explain the many historic and cultural references embedded in the text.

In early 2022, I turned over a Microsoft Word file to her and Fred. Since then, they revised the title (from History of the Town of Ramallah to Remembering Ramallah). More significantly, with the help of another family member, it became a beautiful finished publication. I recently talked with Samira about the challenge of translating a book that was more than 60 years old.

Q: Samira, for those who do not know, who was Joseph Cadora--professionally and his connection with you?

A: Joseph Cadora was born in 1893 in Ramallah. He came to the U.S. to train at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston at the beginning of the 20th century. After finishing his studies, he returned to Ramallah and in 1924 and married my maternal aunt, Nameh Daoud Balat. He owned a pharmacy and later became Mayor of Ramallah from 1943-1952. He then returned to the U.S., where he died in 1958.

Q: With everything else he did, how did he come to write the book?

A: While he was Mayor, he had collected all the notes about Ramallah, its turbulent history, the customs of its inhabitants, its development, and his work as mayor, as well as the work of other mayors. The details in the book came from his notes, historical and archaeological documents, and interviews with town elders. When he arrived in New York, he and my aunt lived with family and there he began writing his memoirs, which became the book. It was printed in New York in 1954 by a now-defunct Arabic printing press known as Al Hoda.

Q: Why do you think he decided to write it?

A: He witnessed an important period of history that took Ramallah from the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World  War I, the British Mandate, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the West Bank becoming part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. And being its Mayor, in a leadership position he had access to dignitaries, commissioners, and important personalities, and he wanted to document all that.

Q: Why did you decide to take on the massive job of translating it from Arabic into English?

A: In 2016, I toured Ramallah with a guide from the Tourism Office. He took me to the historical part of the town and quoted Joseph Cadora as he pointed out the old buildings where the original clans lived. He said that many second generation tourists do not speak Arabic, and he wished that the book were translated into English so he can show it to them. I came back to the US and discussed the possibility of translating it with his son, Frederic Cadora.

 Q: As you really delved into the text to translate, did you come upon any surprises or new discoveries about Ramallah and about your uncle that you did not know before?

A: Yes, definitely! I learnt a lot about Ramallah, which is the hometown of my mother and her family as well. My mother used to relate stories about the clan she is descended from. I began to appreciate local customs, especially the old folksongs which I translated and which taught me about village customs and daily life. These traditions don’t exist anymore, and that is why it is crucial to document them for future generations.

Q: What were the biggest challenges in translating the text? How did you overcome them?

A: Fred advised me to use two very well-known Arabic-English dictionaries, one by Hans Wehr and the other is called is Lane’s Lexicon.  This is my first attempt at translating Arabic to English, and it wasn’t an easy task, because every Arabic word must go back to its third-letter root in order to locate its meaning in the dictionary. Arabic is my mother tongue and I am probably one of the last ones in the family who can read classical Arabic and speak it fluently. I did it to prove to myself that I can master this effort. I am proud that I was able to complete it. I consulted often with Fred over Zoom, discussing words and their origins as well as the context they were used in. Fred and I were very cognizant of the sensitivity of the information, because he and I wanted to remain faithful to the original text that his father had written. We spent many times discussing what his father meant especially when we could not get to the source of the information. And we were careful not to outguess the author and to remain faithful to his intent. Many of the expressions and words are not in use today and it was hard to translate them.

The original book did not have any sources or footnotes. It was very challenging to locate them, list them in a bibliography, and footnote many of the names. I relied on other history books of the period and librarian friends in the Middle East.

Q: I edited your translation and gave you a Microsoft file. It became a beautiful book. How was it designed and published?

A: You, Paula, started that process with us, and the fact that you had no knowledge of the Arabic origin of the manuscript was, I am sure, daunting. I was very happy that you were able to get the meaning of it and you were very instrumental in getting it organized by creating chapters where they did not exist. Your work was a test for me to see whether the translation can stand alone, to see how it can be read without referring to the Arabic text.

After you sent us the file, we went through several versions we worked closely with Joseph Cadora’s granddaughter, Nadia, who took over the design and printing of the book. She hired a designer who did beautiful work. Nadia said since this was the work of her grandfather, she wanted to see it finished in a nice and elegant way. We contacted one or two publishers who publish similar books, but we were turned down, because they thought it would be difficult to market and it would have a limited readership. So we had it independently printed instead. I hope it will be picked up by a publisher, but this is not an easy task!

Q: It must be very satisfying to have the book completed. What are you doing to share it beyond your family?

A: We printed about 400 copies for the time being. I feel satisfied with how it developed and ended, and very appreciative of the valuable assistance I got from everyone who was exposed to it from the beginning. I feel I have accomplished something even if it may not be commercially viable. I feel confident that it will take its place among other history books on Ramallah, as I said in my Introduction, this is proof that the people about whom it is written still exist and do have a vibrant history that merits to be written about.   

To order Remembering Ramallah, written Joseph Cadora, translated and introduced by Samira Meghdassian, and with a foreword by Frederic Cadora, go to https://tinyurl.com/Ramallah-History

I’ve known Mary Collins as a friend, fellow writer, and fellow Connecticut native for 25 years (how did that happen?). From our first meeting on the Virginia street where we both lived at the time, she has given me both encouragement and spot-on feedback, as she has done for others as a teacher and mentor. She is a professor and director of the Writing Minors program at Central Connecticut State University, teaches the nonfiction workshop for Yale Summer Writing Program, and taught in the writing program at Johns Hopkins University for 12 years.

Mary has published three well-researched and well-crafted nonfiction books on different aspects of U.S. history and society. Many of her ideas made their way into the very different type of book that she wrote and illustrated, entitled A Play Book. Mary is now doing workshops and events to share the ideas in the book.

On October 12, 6 to 8 pm, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, she is leading a Free Association Writing workshop. As she told me, “it is ideal for writers at all stages [and genres] since it’s meant to jumpstart a new way of thinking. It focuses on process and reading habits.”

And here’s what she had to say about the ideas in A Play Book and how it came to be:

Q: Can you introduce the book first—what is it and what motivated you to create it?

A: I did not set out to write this book; it came to me in waves over a two-year period. I am so grateful that as a tenured professor I could afford to take a chance, go with the flow of an unusual project and then see it to completion. On some deep unconscious level, I needed to wrestle with why I was seeing such a steep decline in my students’ ability to handle open-ended projects without a rubric, to roam on assignment as writers and come back with ideas and material, and to just interact with each other in free-flowing conversations.

To answer that question, I needed to get back to something that felt free flowing in myself, but after thirty years of writing books and articles, I admit I was totally burned out. Instead, I picked up watercolors and began painting things that felt whimsical and joyful. I was telling stories to myself as I painted a toboggan, for example, but I was also trying to reach back into a playfulness that my students lack and figure out how I achieved it in my own life as a child and adult. I did not see the ending until I finished the essays: that all of this is directly tied to our faltering public discourse and inability to raise functioning citizens for our democracy.

 Q: I finished your book while I was on a train. I started drawing what I was seeing—but it was scary! How did you move from words to images in your creative time? How did you decide to include your illustrations in the book?

A: I found it so refreshing to think in a creative way but with a totally new medium—not words, but paint, water, and brushes. I do not have a lot of skill and zero training, but I let go of worrying about that and realized that when I paint, I really notice things. I get into flow and improved a lot in just three months. I got to the point where I could make a credible painting of what I wanted, which was so satisfying.

 Q: Amidst the reflections, you have some very strong words about how kids are being raised today and the differences you have seen in students over the years. What dismays you—and what, if anything, gives you hope about “Gen Z”?

A: What gives me hope about people under 35 in the U.S. is that my own son, age 30, inspired my project. He had the chance to do many of the things I feel we’ve cut children off from, such as having lots of unstructured time as a child, tons of exposure to nature, art, and noncompetitive activities, and almost no gaming and little social media until college. So it’s not that our generation is “better” by any means. We are seeing the impact of a generation raised on endless access to screens, social media, and gaming—a well-worn complaint, I know—and it’s not pretty. We think our public discourse is bad now, well it’s going to continue to decline if we neglect the important task of raising curious, open-minded thinkers who understand the difference between opinion and fact and who see the power of sharing stories and ideas, not dogma.

At one of the lowest moments of my teaching career, which I discuss in the book, a student asked me to give her a rubric she could follow to write a poem. She wanted a formula (not just sample poems) and had little skill for taking chances, trying something new, and being open. And to be honest, it’s probably not her “fault” but the failing of the entire educational system she’s been put through for years. As Tim Snyder points out in his incredible book On Tyranny, this sort of thinking leads to citizens who want to be fed a story—not facts—and be told what to think and to adhere to the story no matter how much people try to disprove things. Look at what Putin is doing in Russia as he spins the tale about the Ukrainian invasion. I know it feels like a huge leap, but I am trying to convey that it’s not. It’s a terrifying trend and it's happening right now in the U.S.

Q: Right, the book is very whimsical on the one hand but very serious on the other. Many of your ideas—about childhood, nature, community participation—are in your previous books, nicely footnoted and organized. This presents those ideas in a very different, non-linear way. So maybe talk about that?

A: This is a great question because it gets at how people’s reading habits have changed. If, as a writer, I don’t work harder to meet them where they would rather be, I will not reach them. And it’s precisely the nonreader who I want to pick up this book. Several people who are not readers by any means have told me that they loved the short flash essays and read the entire book. The whimsy drew them in and then the intense, serious closer made them think. We are in a world where mixed media is here to stay. I just embraced that.

Q: Along those lines--Creating Writers, Creating Citizens—with that subtitle, what would be the ideal way that you wish people would read and use your book as an individual or in groups.

A: I created a series of cards with some of the art on the cover and group activities on the other side. The book is part memoir, but it’s also truly a workbook. I want people to read it and then think about ways to open their minds, to tap into some of the lessons I showcase from the classroom. I am targeting not just creative writing programs but also parenting groups and national organizations involved in improving public discourse. How do we have conversations centered on story-sharing and empathy, not opinion and dogma? It’s vital we figure it out and, I hope, A Play Book, is a whimsical way into very serious engagement.

 Q: I love this line when you were talking about discerning different tastes—“That sensation of awakeness lies at the root of good creative work.” How does that relate to your own creativity?

A: I use my creative work to make sense of my life and my world. It’s a way to have a dialogue not just with myself but with some imagined target reader. If I stopped “conversing” in this way, I feel I would stop living on some fundamental level. To be “awake” means you stay in motion.

Q: A note about the physical book itself. The cover both looks and feels lovely (very nice paper!). And I know you worked with your friend and colleague Ed Perlman to publish it through his imprint, Entasis Press. So what was that like, versus working with a commercial or university press?

A: After I received a supportive email from an editor who loved the book but could not publish the art, I felt I truly had a book on my hands but not a conventional one by any means. I had worked for 12 years with Ed, a Poetry professor and advisor for the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins. He has a small literary press for poetry and fiction, Entasis Press.

Ed said yes, even though it’s nonfiction, and he fully embraced the amateur art. He was the one that insisted I put the cow on the cover! I feared people would consider the book silly, but he insisted on the “existential truth” that the cow represents and wanted people to wonder, what the hell is this? I’m laughing out loud even as I say this because it meant so much to me that Ed “saw” the full project as soon as he read it. He added front quotes, improved the section structure, and I reordered some of the essays. Suddenly it all made way more sense. The free-flowing approach I took to the pieces meant it didn’t quite cohere and Ed helped me adjust that.

Q: Anything else to add?

A: I cannot express how satisfying it has been and continues to be to hear from people who have read the book and embrace everything about it. I am shocked, actually, how enthused and even emotional people have gotten after reading the book. It’s clearly tapping into something we all know is missing. The  approachable paintings and flash essays help reveal what that is and why it matters. Thank you so much for taking the time to read it, respond and to give me a chance to reflect on these things. It’s just so satisfying. I’ve already gotten out of the book way more than I ever expected and, well, isn’t that the beauty of the creative mindset?

To read more about this and Mary’s other work, visit her website. To learn more about Entasis Press, go here. Order A Play Book through Amazon or an independent bookstore at Bookshop.org.

Eileen Bjorkman is a fellow member of my Zoom writing group, which emerged as one of the benefits of the pandemic. Our group is scattered across time zones so we couldn’t hold monthly meetings in person even if we wanted to. We are at different stages in our projects, from initial research to, in Eileen’s case, publication of her book Fly Girls Revolt: The Story of the Women Who Kicked Open the Door to Fly in Combat in May 2023.

An anecdote illustrates Eileen’s creativity and generosity. In my own research, I came across an account of a hot-air balloonist who ascended 500 feet in the air above Washington at the start of the Civil War. As our group talked about what he might have seen from that height, I forgot we had an expert in our midst. Eileen did some back-of-the-envelope math calculations that I never would known to do and also suggested the view from the top of the Washington Monument as an approximation. Then she offered, “I could try taking someone up in my airplane and have them see what they can see with a set of binoculars from 500 feet or something like that. Just let me know!” I don’t have many (any) writing colleagues who can make an offer like that!

This also gives you an idea how Eileen’s book benefits from her knowledge of flying, her career as an Air Force officer, and her deep respect for the women who “revolted.”

Below are a few questions I had for Eileen about the subject of the book and her approach to researching and writing it.

Q: For those who have not yet read  your book, who are the Fly Girls in the title and what was their revolt?

A: “Fly girl” was a term believed to be coined in the 1920s that referred to any young woman who didn’t conform to societal norms. But the term applies doubly to women of that era who became pilots.

When women were first allowed to train as military pilots in the 1970s and 1980s, they were prohibited by laws from flying combat aircraft. The “revolt” was the 20-year battle the women waged to overturn the laws and then get the military to agree to train women in combat aircraft.

Q: I am taken by their dedication and commitment to their profession and the country. Why was it so important for them to be able not just to fly, but to fly in combat?

A: The combat exclusion laws weren’t fair to anyone. First, not flying combat aircraft meant that women would never get to the highest ranks in the military, where combat experience or training is so valued. Second, the combat exclusion meant that commanders of combat squadrons weren’t necessarily getting the best people to fly their airplanes. Typically, the people who graduate at or near the top of their pilot training class go to fly combat aircraft, but it didn’t matter how good a woman was, she would be sent to fly non-combat aircraft. A man who ranked below her would fly the combat aircraft instead. Third, the combat rules were ambiguous, and commanders had a hard time deciding if it was okay for women to fly into hostile areas where they might be shot at, even though they weren’t flying combat aircraft. Some commanders pulled women off flights that were heading to hostile areas and had to bring in male pilots to replace them.

Q: This brings to mind one of the challenges you did so well. You had to write for people who know the ins and outs of flying, those who know the military but not necessarily flying, and then the rest of us. How did you figure that out?

A: I’ve had a fair amount of practice writing for non-flying and non-military audiences, both from my active-duty days and from writing magazine articles, so I’m pretty good at spotting military and aviation jargon. Sometimes I explain the jargon, and sometimes I write around it. But if I spend more than a sentence or two explaining something, I ask myself whether it’s worth including. If it’s something that’s central to the story, then I’ll take the time to explain it. If not, I might just toss it. I also try to use different beta readers, some who know the military and/or flying and some who don’t. They point out areas where I may need more explanation, or where I have overly simplified something so that a military person might object. But I’ve generally found that military people (including me) don’t mind the extra explanations intended for civilians. I sometimes learn something as well! I tend to err on the side of explanation.

 Q: When you bring in your own experience, it definitely adds to the story. Did you always know you would share your own life in the book? How did you figure out where to insert it?

A: I always figured I would include some of my experiences. I toyed around with bringing myself in during the chapters from the 1970s, but I finally decided on the 1980s with some backstory. With so many characters in the book, I tried to keep each character, including me, in as few places as possible to reduce confusion. And 1980 was a natural breakpoint, since it was the year I came into the Air Force and also the year the first women graduated from the military academies.

Q: Most of my primary sources are the records of long-dead people, but you interview people who were either directly involved or a step or two away. What advice do you have to prepare for these interviews? Did you contact people cold, or have some entrée? When in the research-writing process?

A: I think being retired Air Force helps establish a comfort level right away. People don’t have to worry about using military jargon because I get most of it already. When I’m preparing for an interview on a topic where I don’t have extensive background, I try to learn as much as possible before I start the interview. And I also try to learn as much as possible about the person I am interviewing so I don’t have to ask questions like where they went to school, etc. For people who don’t have bios on the Internet, I usually start off with some background to get the juices flowing and then ask about the specific experiences I’m interested in.

One of the problems I had with Fly Girls was that there is no single woman whose story stretches across the entire timeframe in the book. Instead, I had to piece together different experiences to show the whole picture. I interviewed some women specifically about what they did during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Other women I interviewed about going to pilot training.

I did contact a few people out of the blue, mostly people I found on LinkedIn, but most of the people I either knew, or I got an introduction from someone I knew. In some cases, the Women Military Aviators organization put me in touch with people. I don’t think anyone turned me down for an interview—it was obvious that women (and some men) wanted to tell their stories! As for timing, I always try to do as much research as I can on a particular topic before I start interviewing to help me focus the interviews. For example, I read several articles and a book about the first women who went through Air Force pilot training before I interviewed one of them. That way, I already had a basic outline of what happened so I could focus on her specific experience instead of her having to explain pilot training step-by-step.

 Q: How have you used social media or other platforms to promote the book? What would you recommend that has worked best for you so far?

A: I mostly use Twitter. I have the most followers on Twitter by far compared to other social media, and I tweet about aviation history topics in general. Promoting the book on Twitter fits in naturally, and many people on Twitter buy books. I do a little bit on Facebook, but it seems my Facebook followers don’t buy a lot of books. I don’t do much on LinkedIn because my persona on there is my day job, but other people are posting about the book and tagging me, so I’m just riding on that wave.

Q: You did a bibliography by chapter—what made you decide to use this system rather than more traditional endnotes or footnotes?

A: I wanted the book to be fun and not have an academic feel, so I avoided endnotes/footnotes in the final product, although I did use endnotes in my drafts to keep my references straight. My original plan was to strip out the references and put them in the back, labeled by page number and short quote. But my word count was adding up quickly and my deadline was approaching, so I decided to go with just the bibliography by chapter.

Q: You’ve published a few op-eds recently, such as in the Los Angeles Times—why is the message in your book relevant today?

A: There are still so few women in both commercial and military aviation. About 5 percent of commercial and military pilots are women. If we’re going to have the best military and be a world leader in aviation, we need to use the talents of our entire population, especially given the shortages we currently face in military recruiting, and civilian pilots and mechanics. When half of our workforce doesn’t consider the military or aviation to be a viable career because they see limited women in those fields, we will continue to struggle.

Eileen tweets as @AviationHistGal with, as her handles suggests, bits about aviation history. Her website provides background about her career and how to purchase this and her previous books.

Yesterday, at the Gaithersburg Book Festival, I was “in conversation” with Lynne Olson, author of the book Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction.

The Subject

The empress in question was Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, a French archaeologist and Egyptologist who (1) worked in the French resistance and helped save treasures in the Louvre from the Nazis; (2) was the visionary and in-the-trenches fighter to move huge temples in southern Egypt that would have been submerged by the Aswan dam; and (3) achieved much more in a career that spanned 70 years until her death at age 97.

Christiane constantly fought the British and French men who dominated archaeology in Egypt. Unlike them, as Lynne explained, Christiane was interested in the context and history of the antiquities, not just the extraction of valuables. She learned Arabic and interacted with the Egyptians undertaking the back-breaking labor that the archaeologists directed. In the 1950s, when Gamal Nassar took control of Egypt, she was allowed to remain and work in Egypt, while the other Europeans had to leave.

The Author

A talk with an author is as much about her process as her subject. Lynne explained that she “found” Christiane while writing a previous book about French resistance fighter, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade (which she said usually happens). She thought of writing about a small resistance network that centered around the Musee L’Homme in Paris, but realized that one of its members, Christiane, merited her own book. During World War II, Christiane was in her 20s and worked at the Louvre.

Lynne had to a lot to learn about Christiane’s life, but also about ancient Egypt, the physical and cultural aspects of archaeology along the Nile, Egyptian politics, Cold War politics, and other topics. In the book, she quotes Christiane’s advice to those she mentored: “Do not fear criticism from ‘Dear Colleagues.’ Take a stand!” Lynne took this advice to heart. She admitted to moments of doubt as she “got out of her wheelhouse,” but I admire her curiosity and confidence to forge ahead—all during COVID. She “read like crazy”—but could not travel to Egypt.

After writing eight previous books, Lynne said she recognizes the need for a strong title to draw in readers. Sometimes, she said, she struggles with a title, but she seized on this title right from the start and fought for it with her publisher. “It’s a book about a woman who played a spectacular role in organizing, virtually on her own at the beginning, the greatest archaeological rescue in history, when nobody wanted to save them or thought they could be saved,” she told us.

Subject and Author

How much did Lynne identify with Christiane? Lynne said she was in awe of her subject’s bravery and clearly admires Christiane as the feisty, principled woman she was. “She did not let people stop her, never, ever.”

More broadly, what is the relationship between author and subject?

Earlier yesterday, by coincidence, I watched an interview with Beverly Gage, the award-winning biographer of J. Edgar Hoover. She most definitely did not hold the same admiration and sympathy as Lynne for Christiane, although she did say she respected Hoover a bit more (although not much) by the end of her ten-year project. Still, as she pointed out, we need to understand the people we don’t admire as much as the people we do.

I would rather spend a few years holed up in the archives with Christiane than J. Edgar.

Moderator

That would be me. This was the second time I served as a moderator at this book festival (I interviewed Gayle Jessup White, author of Reclamation, last year). I enjoy keeping in the game while I work on my own next book. Here are a few things I have learned to be a successful moderator:

1. Read the book: I recall several times when I was interviewed by someone who had not.

2. Connect with the author beforehand: Not always possible, but helpful. In this case, we had a Zoom snafu (the “invite” that I sent to Lynne never came, so she thought I had ghosted her), but we at least had a short phone call a few weeks ago.

3. Know your role: People are there to hear and see the author. Yes, there are cases when the interviewer is as famous or more than the interviewee, but I am not one of those people.

4. Don’t give everything away: This is also one of my tenets when I review books. The author wants to sell books!

As scholar Brenda Mitchell-Powell recalls, one of the proudest moments in her life was acquiring her first library card at the age of 4 or 5. Her recognition of the power of libraries to shape people’s lives eventually led her to a doctoral program in library and information sciences. Meanwhile, she moved to Alexandria where she first heard about the events described below—and realized there was much more to tell. Her book Public in Name Only was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2022.

Several years ago, I attended a talk that Brenda gave about her research. A few times over the years, we chatted about her progress in turning her research into a dissertation and then a book. (The endnotes alone are amazing!) One of the things that stuck with me was her conscious decision to publish with UMass to underscore that the story is national, not regional.

On April 30, at 3 p.m., she will participate in a reception, reading, and book-signing event sponsored by the Office of Historic Alexandria at Lloyd House, 220 N. Washington Street, which is across the street from the library where the sit-in took place.

[The comments in brackets in a few of her responses & at the end are my additions.]

Q: To extract from your research, what happened at the Alexandria library on August 21, 1939?

 A: On Monday, August 21, 1939, five young, Black, volunteer protesters—Morris Murray, Otto Lee Tucker, Edward Gaddis, Clarence Strange, and William Evans—who had been trained in Gandhian nonviolent civil disobedience by Samuel Wilbert Tucker, entered the Whites-only library and politely requested library cards. When their requests were denied, each in turn took a book from the shelves and sat down at a separate table to read. Neither the library assistants nor the librarian could persuade them to leave the library. The librarian summoned the police, who eventually escorted the protesters from the library and arrested them on the charge of trespassing. As planned, Tucker, who served as the men’s attorney, went to police court where they were held, paid their bail, and escorted them out. They were to return the next day to be arraigned. Despite the fact that the entire episode was peaceful, decorous, and uneventful, the prosecuting attorney changed the charge to disorderly conduct when he realized he could not convict the five young men on a trespassing charge.

An important point to note is that the Alexandria Library sit-in was not a spontaneous event. It was carefully and thoroughly conceived and executed by Tucker, a prescient, 26-year-old Black attorney and native son. He realized that the city’s African American residents paid municipal taxes that helped subsidize the operation of the Alexandria Library, which legally entitled them to use the facility.

Q: We know about the sit-ins in the 1950s and 1960s (that’s what pops up when I google “first Civil Rights sit-in”), yet this happened more than a decade earlier. How did Samuel Tucker come up with the idea?

A: He and his younger brother, Otto Lee Tucker, were traveling by auto back to Alexandria and began discussing a hypothetical scenario. Samuel asked Otto what he would do if he found his stolen bike on the sidewalk. Otto concurred with Samuel that he’d just take it back. That conversation was one of four that inspired the idea of a sit-in protest.

Prior to the incident, Samuel had been inspired by the 1935 meeting of the National Negro Congress to demand economic justice and industrial and political democracy for Black workers, as well as widely reported, successful automotive labor strikes, particularly those that took place in 1936 and 1937. He had also been inspired by Howard University student sit-ins about administration policies toward student activism. (Operation of the university was largely funded by the government, and the university administrators were reluctant to risk losing that financial backing.) Finally, he was inspired by the 1939 NAACP Annual Conference in Richmond, Virginia, during which it was resolved to challenge public institutions subsidized with public as well as private funds that operated with racially discriminatory policies.

Q: In some ways, the sit-in was not successful, given the result was the construction of an underfunded, segregated library. As you show in your book, some people saw it as a win because there was some public space, however deficient, and it also had an impact beyond Alexandria. How did Samuel Tucker himself see the results?

A: The conclusion of the library protests led to the construction of a separate-and-unequal library that some Black Alexandrians regarded as a partial victory in that they at least had a library they could use. Others, however, were angry and frustrated because it represented another form of Jim Crow segregation. Tucker was incensed by the outcome and neither he nor his family members ever used the African American library branch. 

Q: How do you assess the results--based on your research, your broader knowledge of history, and your residence in the city?

A: I have mixed feelings about the outcome. The sit-in protest and George Wilson’s writ of mandamus filing [NOTE: Shortly before the sit-in, Tucker had tried to obtain a library card for his colleague George Wilson, which was conveniently rejected on a technicality] did prompt the construction of a segregated, inferior branch that provided library access for those Blacks who could afford neither the time nor the financial means to travel to the District of Columbia to use their integrated libraries. But since Black Alexandrians already paid taxes to subsidize the library’s operation, they should have been allowed to use the White library. I am fortunate and suspect I would have used both the Black branch and the D.C. facilities. However, I would not have been happy with the outcome.

Q: You refer to the book as a microhistory. Could you explain what this is and why microhistories are valuable?

A: Microhistory, as distinct from macrohistory, is characterized by its attention to lesser-known events, individuals, and communities on the margins of power and influence. Historian Charles Joyner referred to this process as “asking large questions in small places.”

I used microhistory to investigate the impact of the 1939 Alexandria Library sit-in on the development of library services to White and Black Alexandrians and on the course of library desegregation in the city. I also used microhistory to explore and analyze the role of human agency in the evolution of library history. Tucker employed personal agency to conceive and plan the activities associated with the sit-in, and the five protesters’ communal agency enabled the execution of Tucker’s agenda.

A microhistorical approach allowed me to analyze and contextualize the proactive, nonviolent, direct-action, desegregation initiative of select members of Alexandria’s Black community within the larger frame of the White, historically empowered establishment.           

Q: How did you come to the topic—were you already working on your PhD and decided to use this as your dissertation, or did the topic spur you to go on for your PhD?

A: I was already enrolled in the doctoral program in library and information science at Simmons University when I sought a second home in Alexandria. During my research into the city, I chanced across the Alexandria Black History Museum’s brief, web-based history of the sit-in [NOTE: Brenda has since contributed additional content for the website]. I was surprised and disappointed that neither my library school studies nor my studies in Black history ever made mention of this early, historic civil rights event. I wanted to rectify the records. So, in effect, my dissertation topic found me. My dissertation chair encouraged me to transition the dissertation into a book.

Q: Good advice! What advice do you have for people who want to turn a dissertation or other research paper into a book or article for wider audiences?

A: Buy and read From Dissertation to Book, 2nd ed., by William Germano (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)!! It is an invaluable resource!

Q: What were some of your most valuable sources in putting together a chronology of the events and the larger context? What was a real “a-ha!” moment as you learned about the subject?

 A: Primary sources (archival records, library board meeting minutes, library by-laws, Black and White local and national newspapers, official correspondence) and oral history interviews were the most useful tools for understanding and contextualizing information on events. Secondary sources provided additional information for broad-scope context.

My ah-ha finds were locating Samuel Tucker’s letter to Katharine Scoggin (the Alexandria Library librarian) in which he adamantly stated he had sought admittance to the Alexandria Library rather than the Black branch, and finding the White library’s by-laws in which they explicitly state Blacks were to be denied library access. Whites who were neither Alexandria residents nor taxpayers could freely use the library after a modest $1.50 annual payment.     

Q: Is there anything you wish you could have found but did not? Or put another way, if you could go back to chat with one person involved in the sit-in (whether Tucker, one of the sit-in participants, or even an adversary), what would you want to ask them?

A: I desperately wanted to find out about the lives and activities of the protesters after the sit-in, and I wanted to know their attitudes about the protest outcome. Unfortunately, at that point, Samuel Tucker and all the protesters were deceased. Robert Strange, though not an actual protester, could not be located [NOTE: Tucker had assigned the teenage Strange as a “runner” between the library and Tucker’s law office, so Tucker could be kept apprised of events as they unfolded]. I did interview Samuel Tucker’s niece, Rev. Deborah Thomas-McSwain, and she gave me a wealth of information about Otto Tucker, which was an enormous help. I ended up using the scant information from death notices and city directories but did not find the information I sought.

If I could speak with one person, it would be Tucker. I would ask him how he felt about the group of Black Alexandrians who undermined his efforts to desegregate the library.

Q: Other points that you think are important to stress?

A: It was extremely important to me to implode the myth that the Black Civil Rights Movement was limited to the years 1954–1968. It was also important to situate the protest within the larger story of Alexandria’s history and to situate that history within the histories of Virginia and the South. Context is essential for a full understanding of history. Above all, I wanted to ensure that the marginalized voices omitted from the official record of events were included in the complete story of the protest, so I interviewed surviving Alexandrians, as well as direct and indirect witnesses.

[NOTE: The original Alexandria Library, which was built on Queen Street, is now the Kate Waller Barrett Branch of the Alexandria Library system. The building and an historical marker are shown above. Several blocks away, at 902 Wythe Street, is the Alexandria Black History Museum. As Brenda describes and as shown below, the museum envelopes the “hastily constructed” segregated Robert H. Robinson Library, which opened in 1940, less than a year after the sit-in.

Brenda was recently interviewed by John Kelly for his column in the Washington Post and has given presentations at the Alexandria Library and in other venues. As noted above, on April 30, 3 p.m., she will participate in a reception, reading, and book-signing event sponsored by the Office of Historic Alexandria (OHA) at Lloyd House.

You can buy a copy of Brenda’s wonderful book at the Alexandria Black History Museum, The Lyceum, Freedom House Museum, or the Alexandria Tourist Center, or you can order it from an independent bookstore, or buy it online.]  

When I first moved to Washington, DC, I wondered why it is shaped the way it is. When I moved to Alexandria a few years later, I learned that Alexandria and Arlington County are part of the reason why.

I decided that Retrocession—in which Alexandria “retroceded” back to Virginia from the District in 1846—would be a good topic to propose for a poster at the recent D.C. History Conference.

More of a Deal than I Expected

I could blame it on COVID and the fact that I have not attended in-person conferences for a while. Or that I got busy with other things and did not really focus on the “poster” part of “poster session.” Whatever the reason, early last week, I received an email from the organizer with the specs and saw a photo of a poster session from an earlier conference.

Dang! Those posters looked good.

Fortunately, my friend Beth had information about posters from her work at the University of Washington. She sent a few links, including a template to use in PowerPoint. I found a trifold display board that my son and a friend had used for a middle school science fair. I stripped off the description of their experiment. (It involved inserting a seed into a tulip bulb to see how both grew; hopefully, I did wantonly destroy a scientific breakthrough.) Instead of the floppy cardboard that I planned to use, I had a firm 2’ by 3’ piece of foamcore.

The main advice was to pose only question and not use too many words to answer it. I laid out my question—Why is D.C. shaped the way it is?

Then I used the template to create blocks of text and images. By Thursday, it looked pretty good on my screen.

Only one problem—how to print it super-large? I could have sent it to Staples, but I didn’t want to spend the money for one-time use or deal with sending something and finding something to fix. Besides, as you may have gathered, I waited until the last minute.

My husband found a way to “tile” sections of the whole to print. We tried this many times in black-and-white. The problem was weird text and picture breaks that we couldn’t seamlessly close up. The craft glue in a drawer in the basement clumped. Friday afternoon, the breakthrough inspiration was to position each block on its own piece of paper. A trip to a craft store revealed a whole new world of glues. Spraymount adhesive is my new friend. We assembled the piece on the dining room table Friday night.

Miraculously, on Saturday morning, it was still in one piece. Unfortunately, it was also raining. Two garbage bags protected it before the Big Reveal.

After all this, would anyone even show up to see my poster? Most of the conference took place on the library’s fourth floor, but the poster session was on the first floor. Would attendees come down?

Yes! And so did many other visitors to the library. (Maybe the rainy day brought more people indoors.) The result was a really fun two hours talking with some people who knew more about retrocession than I did, some people who had never heard of it, and many people in between.

And Now: The Content

Alexandria (which encompassed the current city and Arlington as Alexandria County) was part of the District of Columbia from 1801 to 184g, when it “retroceded” to Virginia.

For those like me who need a refresher, several states wanted to host the capital of the new nation. Prestige and money was at stake. While the wheeling-and-dealing for a permanent capital took place and then during construction, short-term solutions included Philadelphia, New York, and Annapolis.

Southern politicians, especially Virginians like Thomas Jefferson pushed for a capital further south. Virginia resident George Washington added pressure to consider the area around the Potomac. Washington, a surveyor, saw the region as “the gateway to the interior.” It didn’t hurt that the location would benefit his plantation at Mount Vernon and other business dealings. Debate stalled until a deal between Alexander Hamilton from New York and James Madison of Virginia was reached.

In the 1790s, Maryland and Virginia each ceded land to create a square that was 10 miles long on each side. Within it, the towns of Alexandria in Virginia and Georgetown in Maryland already existed. A new federal enclave with a building for Congress and the Supreme Court, the President’s House, and offices for the few federal agencies that existed were constructed. The first president to live in Washington was the second president, John Adams.

Alexandria’s city leaders thought they saw a good deal. The first of 40 boundary stones marking the District was placed at Jones Point, just below the city of Alexandria on the Potomac River, on April 21, 1791. A blessing by Rev. James Muir contained the following well-meaning thought:

Under this stone, may jealously and selfishness be forever buried.

Enthusiasm among Alexandria’s elite waned over the next few decades for a number of reasons:

• Figuring-out pains: How would this new entity be governed? Who would try crimes? Which laws would prevail? Surprise—no one in Congress who passed the legislation thought this through.

• Commercial disincentives: The law that established the District stipulated that no federal buildings would be built on the Alexandria side of the Potomac. So much for the gravy train. Construction of the C&O Canal diverted interior trade away from Alexandria.

• Political power: Alexandrians realized that as part of the District of Columbia, they had no national representation.

• Slavery: By the time the retrocession movement gained support, there was some movement to restrict slavery in the District. (The 1850 ban on slave-trading, often circumvented, was the only result).

Retrocession required approval by the Virginia General Assembly, U.S. Congress, and Alexandria voters. The local election took place September 2, 1846, with a resounding pro-retrocession victory (763 to 222).

Supporters paraded through the streets, marching around a huge bonfire and making merry. A song composed for the event included the chorus:

Hurrah! We’ll retrocede.

For freemen’s lives we are bound to lead,

And to Virginia retrocede…

The happy crowd did not see the irony in celebrating that retrocession meant freedom. The Black population certainly did. Moses Hepburn, a free Black businessman, wrote northern abolitionist Gerritt Smith that as a running tally of the retrocession vote was announced from the  courthouse steps, Black Alexandrians waited anxiously:

The suppressed wailings and lamentations of the people of color were constantly ascending to God for help and succor in this their hour of need.

They could not vote, but they had to bear the consequences of the lopsided approval.

The laws and practices in the District for a Black man, woman, or child were difficult enough, and, indeed, some of Virginia’s laws applied to Alexandria pre-retrocession. But retrocession to Virginia removed Alexandria from any Congressional oversight, stepped up enforcement of existing laws (such as a ban on Black schools), and introduced new restrictions.

A Term Used Today?

I fashioned the poster with the 1840s in mind. A few people, who had seen the title in the program, came over to see if I advocated retroceding the District of Columbia back to Maryland. Most definitely not.

D.C. Statehood, Long Overdue!

I met Diana Parsell at a meeting of the Washington Biographer’s Group in 2015 or so. She was deep into research about Eliza Scidmore, the woman you’ll meet below (along with Diana herself). Her excitement about Scidmore was contagious. At the same time, she was not getting traction in finding an agent or publisher, and I admired her perseverance. Lo and behold, when the pandemic first hit in Spring 2020, I saw a Facebook post that she had signed a contract with Oxford University Press! With all the depressing news around us, I remember how good it felt to read this glimmer of positive news.

Since then, Diana completed her manuscript—and her book is coming out in March 2023 (just in time for cherry blossom season). Here’s a bit more about the biographer and her subject:

 Q: What are the outlines of Eliza Scidmore’s life? I know I am asking you to simplify years of your research, but what makes a biography of her necessary to 21st-century readers?

 A: Writing Eliza Scidmore’s story, I came to see her as a member of that all-too-large sisterhood we’ve come to think of as “hidden figures.” Scidmore fell into near obscurity for more than a century despite a legacy that includes her fight to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington, D.C. Research led me to uncover little-known details about  her pioneering work as a female journalist and travel writer, an expert on Alaska and Japan, a major voice in the burgeoning U.S. conservation movement, and the most important woman in the early history of National Geographic.

I was drawn to her story in part out of a keen desire to know how she managed to achieve all she did in her day, when most women did not have careers and female ambition was frowned on. Questions about her life seemed to resonate with my own experience and that of other women I know. Questions of how to make a life when one’s instincts don’t accord with family or societal expectations; how to reconcile a hunger for creative expression and freedom with the need to make a living; how to say true to oneself in a world that values conformity.

Q: How did you find her and what made you decide to commit yourself to telling her story?

A: The origin dates to a chance incident more than a decade ago, when I bought a paperback on a work-related trip to Southeast Asia. It was the reprint of an 1897 travelogue, Java, the Garden of the East. Who was this author, E.R. Scidmore, I wondered, and what had taken him to the East Indies? 

Naturally, I Googled the name. Results stunned me when I discovered the author was an American woman. Most surprising was her key role in giving Washington its cherry blossoms. I had lived in the area more than three decades. I went nearly every year to see the cherry trees in bloom. How had I never heard of Eliza Scidmore? I started researching her at the Library of Congress. Gradually, one tiny clue after another led me to relevant material at a couple dozen institutions, much of it “hidden in plain sight.” The many new findings I uncovered convinced me I had the makings of a significant work of scholarship in providing the first-ever biography of Scidmore.

Q: What was her reputation at the time? Did she write under her full name, and would people have recognized her byline?

A: I had been researching Scidmore a couple of years when a big breakthrough occurred. At first I found only patchy records of her journalism. Then one day, I discovered she used a pen name in her early newspaper work, a common practice of the day. She wrote as “Ruhamah,” her middle name. It was unusual enough that when I searched for that name in historical newspaper databases, I got a flood of columns and travel letters she wrote over a decade—about 650 for a single newspaper alone. That was a major development because the datelines gave me a core chronology of her travels.

Because editors freely excerpted work from other papers, Scidmore’s distinctive pen name became recognizable to readers across the country. Once she moved into magazine journalism in the late 1880s, she started publishing under her full name. That greatly elevated her national profile and made her something of a celebrity journalist. Newspapers routinely reported the comings and goings of “Miss Scidmore.”

 Q: Could she live off of her earnings as a writer? 

A; Amazingly, especially for a woman who came from modest circumstances and never married, she seems to have been self-supporting throughout her life. One newspaper colleague in Washington wrote that she earned more than some male reporters, thanks to her strategy of combining social reporting in the winter with travel writing in the other months. Her published work shows her to be a master at repurposing her material for different markets. In her extensive reporting from Asia, she had the financial advantage of favorable exchange rates and the practical benefits of a home base with her brother, a longtime U.S. consular official in Japan.

Q: What advice do you have for biographers when the subjects whom they like do unlikable things? For example, you had to deal with things she said and did that are not acceptable today—from use of language to attitudes to buying up cultural treasures in Asia.

A: Scidmore’s use of racist language and culturally insensitive stereotypes in some of her writings is a matter that, of course, I had to address in the text. I was concerned about how to handle it, as I’m not trained as an academic and didn’t have the theoretical foundation to discuss issues related to colonialism, cultural appropriation, and so on. Fortunately, I had a great editor at Oxford who offered to have the final manuscript reviewed by several people with scholarly expertise in these areas. Their comments were immensely helpful.

Q: Any favorite moments to share in the research or writing of this book?

A: My favorite part of doing this book was sharing Scidmore’s story with others. I started a website and blog early on. It brought a lot of queries from people who found me online –reporters, historians, women bloggers, educators, and students. An email from a young female park ranger led to a speaking engagement at Glacier Bay in Alaska (where a glacier is named for Scidmore). When I went to Japan for research, I was interviewed about Scidmore and her role in D.C.’s cherry blossoms on national TV.

I found, as many biographers do, that research is the best part of doing a book. A particularly memorable moment of “research rapture” occurred one evening at dusk when I was holed up in my cramped and shabby researcher’s office at the Library of Congress. A small window overlooked the rooftops of Capitol Hill, and I could see in the far distance the silvery ribbon of the Potomac River. I was reviewing an original copy of Scidmore’s 1893 travel guide on Alaska. It had a pocket at the back, containing a map. When I unfolded it to its full length, of about 7 by 28 inches, it showed, in the beautifully rich colors of nineteenth-century cartography, the route of Alaska excursion steamers in the 1880s. It was the same route along the Inside Passage that Eliza Scidmore had traveled on her historic first trip to Alaska in 1883.

Q: Conversely, what do you consider your biggest obstacles and how did you overcome them?

A: The biggest hurdle came in trying to secure an agent who believed in the story as much as I did. In retrospect, I realize I made a big mistake in pitching the book too early, when the significance and structure were not yet well gelled in my mind. That was reflected in the muddiness of my early proposals, which brought more than 30 rejections. In the end, I went with Oxford University Press because academic publishers don’t require agents for submission of proposals. Within days after I submitted a query to an editor at Oxford, based on a personal referral, she asked to see my proposal, followed by a request to send it out for standard peer review. All three reviewers gave the book a thumbs-up for publication. 

Other major obstacles included barriers of access to essential records. In one instance, an entire collection of letters I needed had been sent out for digitization, putting them off limits for nearly a year. Another institution with a strong proprietary hold on its archives rebuffed my repeated requests for access. I finally got around that by seeking out someone inside the organization who appreciated the importance of my research and used her clout to intervene. Then, of course, came the fall-out from Covid, just as I was trying to obtain the final records as well as historic photos for the book. It all made the push to the finish line pretty stressful.

Q: What is next for you?

A: This is my debut book. I started it around the time I turned 60, when most people are looking toward retirement. It took me a decade to complete, and I find it hard to think I might have the stamina to do another book. Having said that, I’ve been intrigued by a story that came to my attention while writing this one, so we’ll see. Meanwhile, I look forward to getting back to some serious blogging on Scidmore and her times. I’ve compiled a long list of ideas for interesting spin-off stories, and I find it very satisfying to write about history in smaller bites.    

Read more about Diana Parsell on her website, which includes a list of her upcoming speaking engagements. The book is available through bookstores starting March 1, or online via bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. If ordering through the publisher’s website, at www.oup.com, use the code AAFLYG6 for a 30% discount.   

About BIO

Through BIO’s conferences and newsletters, I’ve learned from prize-winning, best-selling, and/or really smart people about aspects of biography writing large and small, sweeping and mundane. How they choose their subjects. How they organize their research. How they decide how to structure a manuscript. How they acquire agents, publishers, and publicity. And on and on. I also belong to a wonderful writing/accountability/support group that evolved from a BIO conference.

This gets me to the Craft Lab. Its format sprang from the pandemic, specifically those mass Zoom sessions that, when done right, bring far-flung people together. Like other organizations, BIO held its annual conferences in this fashion from 2020 through 2022. (An in-person, three-day conference is scheduled for May.) The board of directors used this format for BIO’s first-ever, one-day workshop.

I’ll share a few highlights here, but each speaker had much more to share. Further down, I’ve inserted links to their websites and another shout-out to BIO.

A Biographer’s Choices

Dame Hermione Lee has written biographies of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Tom Stoppard, and other British and U.S. writers. In a plenary session pre-recorded in her book-filled, very English-looking study, she spoke about “a biographer’s choices.” Acknowledging fate, luck, and chance, she added, “the rest is up to us.” And so—

• Fear never goes away: Each project she has tackled has a different element of fear, whether to write about a U.S. author (Cather, Wharton) as an Englishwoman or to write about a living subject (Stoppard). It’s a question of what to do with that fear. Heck, if she can acknowledge (and overcome) fear, can’t we?

• Gaps, blank holes, and inconsistencies are good: Nonfiction writers must deal with the unknown. Papers are missing or do not explain a certain event. Even if they do, they might not reveal a person’s motivations. Her attitude? Of course this happens! And maybe (to paraphrase)—bring it on! To Lee, a biography should leave unanswered questions.

Curating Context: How to Angle for a Subject’s Unwritten Voice through Various Sources

Eric K. Washington’s biography Boss of the Grips is about James H. Williams, who was prominent in early 20th century as the organizer of New York Grand Central Station’s Red Caps. Washington shared insights on writing about a subject without the benefit of personal letters, diaries, and the like.

• “Truffling”: Washington described his searches through old newspapers, vital records (census, birth, marriage, death), records of Williams’s contemporaries, and other sources. He does not just read the high-level information, he really reads them. Example: The church where Williams was married, semi-buried on his marriage certificate, led Washington to a key discovery about Williams’s private life (which I will not spoil here).

• The untold and the telling: When all is not told explicitly, look for telling details in photos, maps, the lives of secondary characters, etc. Washington is a fan of event rosters, guest lists, and other lists of names that show, in the case of James H. Williams, the “company he kept.”

It’s a Personal Matter: Characters and Their Uses

T.J. Stiles focused his lab session on writing choices, drawing from his biographies of Jesse James, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and George Custer. I’ve heard Stiles speak before; although I admit I not a fan of his subjects, I read his books with awe.

• Investigation and story: Narrative nonfiction has two strands—investigation (researching, interpreting is found) and the story. Stiles draws on tools of fiction to create suspense, tell a narrative, and build characters.

• Protagonists, antagonists, and secondary characters: These are the large groups of characters that interact with the main subject in some way. Specifically related to secondary characters, who to include and who to exclude? A steady stream of folks marching in and out of a story is confusing, but obviously some are needed to move things along, so Stiles urged thinking about this carefully.

Filling in the Blanks: How to Deploy History in All Kinds of Biographies

Caroline Fraser’s biography, Prairie Fires, won the nation’s top awards in 2018. No doubt one reason is that, as she noted in her talk, she covered much more than the life of children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder. She wove in the historical events that affected Wilder, such as white settlers’ relations with Native Americans, the environmental impacts of Homestead-era farming, and the effect of the Depression on Wilder’s and millions of families.

• Take a wide shot: To Fraser, this movie technique to establish the big picture is a useful construct for biography (and other nonfiction) writing. As she said, a movie cannot just be an unremitting series of close-ups.

• Historical context to fill in the gaps: What is happening in the world also serves as a way to explain aspects of your subject when you don’t have other documentation. As an example, Fraser figured out why only Laura Wilder’s name appeared on the deed for the house she shared with his husband (again, I’ll leave her to tell you why).

Learn More from These Authors and from BIO

I am hoping that I inspired you to read these authors’ works to see how they apply what they talked about. I am going back into several of the books to re-read them and have added others to my list.

Also:

Website for Hermione Lee: http://www.hermionelee.com

Website for Eric K. Washington: https://www.ekwashington.com

Website for T.J. Stiles: https://www.tjstiles.net

Website for Caroline Fraser: https://www.carolinefraser.net/index.htm

Last but not least, again, the website for BIO: https://biographersinternational.org