hi I'm Heather Marie montia and you are watching PBS books thank you for joining us PBS books is speaking with a word winning writer and Scholar tyia miles author of wild girls how the outdoors shape the women who challenged a nation earlier this year PBS launched an unprecedented environmental and climate programming initiative that explores the impact on the country and the planet this comprehensive effort marks a bold commitment to bring the very best in science history and news programming what's so exciting about today's conversation is that we're able to look at history and see how women and the outdoors influenced the creation of our nation well today I'm here with t miles and we're discussing her latest book so let's meet t she is a professor of history and Radcliffe Alum professor at the Radcliffe Institute for advanced study and the director of The Charles Warren Center for studies in American history at Harvard University she is the winner of many awards and fellowships including the national book award and the MacArthur Fellowship welcome T you Heather well I'm so glad to have you here and so excited to discuss your book with with you can you briefly describe your book to the audience what is the premise I can so I think of wild girls as a little book about girls who dreamed big outdoors and the book follows the childhood stories and development and adulthood actions of a number of people who are actually quite well known today people like Harriet Tubman and Louisa May Alcott who during their girlhood spent quite a lot of time outdoors and in that space honed their Spirits tested their skills and widened their abilities at the very beginning you eloquently State amid the trials of our current times nature can be a bridge that holds us joins us and AIDS us can you discuss your inspiration for the book and why now yes so I started thinking about this book during Co during the height of Co when many of us were experiencing that feeling of being overwhelmed and frightened and um isolated when we were in many cases having to stay put within our homes when our kids were going to school from home and I remember how my Outlook on my own family life and my community life changed during that period I became very focused on our bird feeders outside and I was actually part of a neighborhood group that would run around doing errands for people who BN T Mobile and one of the request I got was to go pick up some pots and soil for a woman who was going to be growing tomatoes in her yard for the first time my kids and I created a fairy garden in our yard during that time and my family took numerous walks around the neighborhood and saw other people who we really hadn't seen before but who obviously lived nearby doing the same so the outdoors became a psychological Lifeline for our family during that period And I realized one day while talking to a neighbor who has a fabulous yard a double lot with a pond and multiple wonderful trees that it was a great privilege for my family during that time that we had a yard that we lived in a neighborhood with old tree growth and wonderful tree canopy that we could walk by our neighbors homes and see Gardens and Flowers In Bloom which lifted our Spirits I realized this was a privilege that many people who were also locked down many families with children who were confined to their homes didn't necessarily have and I thought it was terribly important for us to consider the impact of access to outdoor space on our lives that's so very interesting I don't know if I thought of it that way and and I definitely agree um as someone who lived in New York City and then had moved to Michigan before the pandemic we definitely thought about how it would have been if we still lived in 12 100 square feet in New York city so I certainly understand that um and certainly in Michigan we had plenty of access to to trees and grass and outdoor space which made it easier to have three kids and still being lockedown so for sure in your book you highlight an array of women but you begin your book by sharing a very personal story can you talk about the unique connection you have with the Ohio River including what is an I bridge I grew up in Cincinnati Ohio I was born there and uh my grandparents generation moved there from the south as a part of uh the second wave of the great migration of African-Americans uh into urban areas and into the North and into the west and I always had some kind of relationship with the Ohio River uh at times my family lived by the Ohio River I always heard about the Ohio river and during one one year when I was around seven the Ohio River froze it froze all the way across to Kentucky and it froze uh very deep and this was one for the record books and all the papers were reported on it you can find articles about it right now thinking back to the winter of 7778 when the river froze and my father who is a very adventurous kind of parent took my sister and me down to the river and uh walked out on the river with us and allowed us to stand in the middle of the Ohio know stand on the middle of the Ohio which was an incredbly moving electrifying transformative experience to actually have your feet you know as a child as a girl with your sister on a waterway that is usually churning and teing and full of ways and and and a little bit scary it was incredible to look across and see Kentucky to see Kentucky right there and this was especially important because the Ohio river is a border that has a historical import it's a border between the North and the South it's the river that ens Slave people had to cross if they were going to make it to Freedom so before we launch into the discussion about your book one of the things I know is I I've know I know a lot about the Fugitive Slave Act about from 1850 but I'm sure not everyone has the same uh knowledge base and what I'm hoping is that you could talk a little bit about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 why it's important in this conversation and how it shaped uh a drastic change in what was happening in the United States at the time yes the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a law passed by Congress which made it much more difficult for enslaved people in the South to escape to the north and make new lives what that law did was it commissioned it charged any white person in the north with the right to capture a black person who was enslaved and those people who were captured would be held in jails they would be forcibly sent back to those who own them and this was a means of cracking down not only on the number of escapes but also on the Abolitionist Movement which had gathered quite a lot of steam in the 1830s and was working on the ground and also culturally through writing and performance to take down the system of slavery and just to discuss this also uh was a tool to I I know that there was a moment that there were free African-Americans in the north who were captured and kidnapped and would be then brought back and and put into slavery and that also was a trend that was occurring at the time is that correct absolutely so we have the example of Solomon Northrup and his narrative Seven Years a Slave which tells us just one of those stories of black people who were free but who were kidnapped sent south and enslaved and this law gave license to anyone who was white to question to track down to hunt to capture and to remand into slavery anybody who was black it took away a sense of safety and Safe Haven that had formerly been associated with the North and when this law was passed many formerly enslaved people who had moved to Northern cities felt that their lives were no longer possible there and they moved to Canada so you talk about um Margaret Gardner uh in the very beginning of your book and you you you share her story which is a very difficult story to read can you share it with our audience today yes Margaret Garner was a black girl who was born in Boon County Kentucky in the 1830s and she had an experience that was common unfortunately and sadly so to many enslaved black girls and women and that is that she was vulnerable and exposed to sexual harassment and sexual abuse by the man who owned her so Margaret Garner had children with the man who owned her and she also married a black man in the area named Robert Garner he was also enslaved they would have had to have permission to do this and that marriage would not have been considered legal at the time Margaret Garner and her husband Robert Garner and Robert's parents decided one winter when the Ohio River froze over that they were going to try to escape they were going to try to leave this very abusive situation in which Margaret Garner uh was still having babies who looked very much like her owner even as she was having babies with her husband and they watched the weather they were very attuned to and aware of their environment and they chose a particular winter when there were enough cold days in a row that the Ohio River froze and that winter they escaped across the river which was referred to as an ice bridge to get back to your previous question Heather in the newspapers at the time and they weren't alone there were other enslaved people who were escaping from those border states right along the the Upper Ridge of the South into northern states like Ohio the Gunner story is uh heroic and arresting and it's also tragic because the family did make it across that River they made it and they got to a safe house and they were about to be moved to another safe location by people who were in service to the Underground Railroad but Margaret's owner also the legal owner of her children came with a basically a posy of men including law enforcement officers who were all at that cabin with the law behind them the Fugitive Slave Act was the law that they could use to justify what they were doing and this is the part this gets very very sad but when Margaret Carter knew that her owner and these uh these officers with weapons were outside demanding that she and her family give themselves up to be taken back to slavery she began to harm her children and this is a story that has been written about in many forms and it's been performed on many stages Tony Morrison's P Sur priz winning novel beloved is based on this story Berg Conor actually did kill one of her children as she was attempting to save them from slavery in the end she and her children who survived were not saved from slavery they were actually sent farther south so it is a tragic story at the same time that it is a story that shows the length that enslaved parents parents would go to try to free their families and it shows how the outdoors could be a space where Freedom was possible it is uh I I think including this at the very beginning of your book captures the reader it it helps us to understand what what we're talking about first of all the the thought that the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850 and then I think it was five years between 1851 and you know 57 the river actually froze and created an icebridge and I I thought that part in your book was incredibly intriguing to think about that here this terrible thing happened at the same time this nature is playing a role in almost fighting against it making it giving another way to escape that that didn't always exist and especially the Ohio River um I know that it wasn't until I was an adult that I even I went ice skating on a lake and even then I was like oh my gosh what if it breaks right and to think of the Ohio River this massive important waterway that it's frozen and also just The Bravery right to to use that because they don't know when it's not frozen anymore necessarily and just but but the the dire situation so thank you for sharing that I I know it's uh it is it was tragic and and hard to read but I'm glad you are able to share it with with all of all of the viewers I want to talk a little bit if we can pull away from from that extraordinary tragedy and talk a little bit about gender roles and expectations because within your work you really contextualize the framework of American society and I I wanted I was was hoping you could speak a little bit about what are some of the cultural expectations and social norms that girls and women in the euroamerican Christian Society were expected to to how they were expected to yes so thank you for framing the question that way Heather because one of the things that I try to do in wild girls is to show that there was an overarching expectation of about how girls and women should behave in American society in the 19th century and at the same time there was a a great diversity of experience among girls especially related to their racial identity and categorization their their class and cast status where it was that they were living in the country and this range this diversity meant that girls would be expected to meet those expectations in different degrees some girls would actually not be expected to meet them at all and some girls would push against them and resist them in different ways so when we think about mainstream American culture in that time period there was a very high ideal that was placed on women the idea was that women were to be um the the perfect models of Christian charity of humility of modesty of submission so they were supposed to exude all of these qualities associated with Christianity but in a highly feminized way so girls and women were expected to be the Servants of their communities the Servants of of their households they were expected to be incredibly modest to comport themselves in ways that were always making them smaller and making men larger they were supposed to be obedient to the men and their families to the men at the head of the church to The Men Who who ran the schools they were not supposed to be thinking and acting independently and this is part of what I explore in the book the ways in which girls in different walks of life in different locations from different backgrounds understood and confronted that gender system how was this different for INS slaved African-Americans and Indigenous peoples acknowledging of course that there were more than 500 there are more than 500 indigenous tribes today and back then there were even more right so how was this different for and I know it's you can't answer it one way but how was it different as a trend so for white American women especially those of the middle and upper classes this expectation about idealized femininity was constraining it put limits on their lives it me they didn't have autonomy and Independence over decisions they've make in their lives over their their children over their bodies and at the same time this ideal lifted white women onto a pedestal so yes they were limited yes they were supposed to be submitting to white men but they were also supposed to be protected by those same men so that harm would not come to them of course harm did come to many white women there's so many complexities in history but that was the ideology and that was the expectation at the time girls of color women of color did not have that same pedestal status or the same expectation of protection from society that would recognize that would recognize their femininity in a way that suggested they should be respected so for African-American girls there was actually a cultural attempt to strip them of their femininity so black girls in many cases were not expected or actually allowed to have modesty to have protection they were instead made in many times that in many cases that they were enslaved to Bear their their bodies by wearing clothing that was old and tattered and thin to to work physically in ways that were viewed as masculine when they were U forced to to agricultural work in the fields or to work with uh creating roads in the South so they were stripped of femininity black women were in many cases but I I want to add Heather that at the same time African-American girls and women were numbers of families that in many cases were also Christian and they were getting these messages from their families from the the broader society that they were supposed to be these virtuous women now of course being enslaved and being black meant that was never going to be possible for them and in some cases there was a very strong inner conflict that enslaved black women felt because they knew they could never be the ideal but they wanted to be the ideal because their culture and by their culture I mean American culture R larged which they took part in was was telling them that they should look a certain way dress a certain way act a certain way but the systems that they were embedded within would not allow that so as we think about this conflict in your book you in many ways equate outdoor experiences with imagination and with freedom can you discuss an example yes I will uh discuss Harry Tubman to begin with because she's the person whose story really anchors this book she's the person who I thought at first when I knew that I wanted to write this book and she is someone who many of us and perhaps even you know all of us have heard of so by looking at Harriet tuppen's story I hoped I would be able to demonstrate in a way that everybody could connect to and see this critical link between time outdoors and the development of creative ideas the development of skills and the shaping of women who would be Dauntless in their own lives so Harry Tubman was enslaved uh on the ches Peake Bay the Eastern Shore in Maryland she was born in the mid to early 1820s and her family she and and her mother and siblings were often leased out by the people who owned them so they were moving around other farms and plantations in the area separated from each other and T was doing all kinds of work from a very young age from the age of you know around four five six seven in these different environments the work was terrible the work she had to do was dangerous it was taxing it was frightening at one of these locations har Tubman as just a small girl you know around the age of of a first grader in our time had to go out and collect muskrat carcasses from the iron traps that the person who had rented her was using for his uh fur training Enterprise so a little tiny girl taking the dead bodies of muskrats out of these traps so this was all a nightmare scenario for this little girl har Tubman and yet through her time outside she was was actually able to learn what existed out there waterways existed out there Woods existed out there animals were out there who could actually help they could be company they could provide ways to have some comfort they could provide food during a freedom Journey they could provide shelter during a freedom journey and it was outdoors I argue in the book that Harry Tubman first began to dream about what Freedom could be like and how she could achieve that and I just want to add here Heather that I think the evidence for this actually exists in the reminiscences that we have from Harry Tubman because she does recount her dreams and in her dreams she imagines herself as a bird flying to Freedom so this I think is a direct reflection of the ways in which she was girl outside looking up at the sky and seeing what was possible so that is incredibly beautiful I need to tell you that I will never look at the weeds in my garden uh or my lawn the same after reading this book because now I will always think of Harriet Tubman who the is the Ultimate Outdoors woman as you argue and is very clear throughout the book but you equate her to and she has been referenced she's like a weed a neglected like just a weed a neglected weed and um I found it to be very clever and fun um but also when I think of how persistent the weeds are and how they you know you can tear them down uh but if you don't get all the roots they still are growing back they're still there back exactly and when you you think about Harriet tman as you so so clearly outlining in this book how many trips she took that she saved I think 70 to 80 enslaved people helped them to to make it to safety was really incredible um and just didn't know if you wanted to share anything more about the neglected weed I would love to and one of the things that I want to share which I think is very important is that that was Tubman's language Tubman said I grew up like a neglected weed lead so she herself is using a a a simile from nature to explain what her experience was like so I had read that quote before Heather I had read it you know probably years ago it appears in a collection of interviews with formally enslaved people who had escaped to Canada edited by Benjamin Drew and published in Boston in the 1850s but that mention of the weed didn't really impress me didn't stick with me until I went back to Harriet Tubman's um reminiscences with this thought that I was looking for girls outdoors I was looking to see how outdoor spaces had influenced the development of girls in the 19th century and then that weed quote jumped out at me and I sat with it and I thought clearly har Tu was thinking about weeds when she was a child clearly this made a big impression on her and what are weeds I had to ask myself what are weeds we take these things for granted I think often weeds are only joined together as a category because they are the kinds of plants that humans don't want right that's all they have in common that's true and this was this was a profound realization for me about Harry Tubman's recognition just how devalued she was by the people who owned her and rented her she knew she was devalued she knew she wasn't wanted but she also knew as a girl who had worked Outdoors that weeds will keep on coming back that's exactly what she did yes she did yeah and I love the the length of the the stories that you you give about her upbringing and also her entrepreneurial spirit and just how everything everything she did and um it was it's wonderful how you wo all all of that in not just in one chapter but it's sprinkled um you you talk a lot about we've talked about the ice Bridge um something I also did not know about and I think is important to note is the 1833 meteor shower the meteor storm um can you talk a little bit about the meteor storm what were the impacts and how is a maybe Amanda Young connected to them so in 1833 there was a very dramatic Celestial event which is now known as the 1833 Leonid meteor shower or storm and we do have these these Leonid meteor storms um every once in a while they're they're not common but neither are they absolutely unique but the 1833 occurrence seems to have been unique in that it was visible across the country it was visible to people who weren't trying to go to special places to see it and it was incredibly dramatic it appeared to people all over that the stars were falling and this is often the language people use to describe their experience that this was the night the Stars fell and one thing that I think is beautiful about this this meteor storm and how visually dramatic it was is that it actually connected people from different walks of life and then different places who were seeing the storm and sometimes um representing the storm visually trying to draw it trying to quilt it telling stories about it but of course it would have been experienced differently by people who were uh located in our racial hierarchy you know in our class hierarchy in in various locations and so in the book I look especially at how enslaved people experien that meteor storm because this storm comes up across the memories of people who had been enslaved people who witnessed it talk about it people who weren't born yet but heard about it from a parent or a grandparent talk about it and they describe just the sheer luminosity and strangeness of this night when it seemed like there were just thousands of stars falling upon them and they also describe the way in which that occurrence shook up the power relations shook up the system of who was in charge who gave orders and who was disempowered and who was to listen to orders in their experience because enslavers were also watching the storm and shocked and terrified and in the case of Amanda young we have an example of a woman who was on a plantation she experienced that storm and after the storm her enslavers were so terrified that they started telling people where their relatives had been sold away to because they thought this was Judgment Day so this is an example of how u a natural event could be so powerful and so life-changing for people in different locations and in different um social categories and especially for enslaved people in this [Music] example thank you for that one of my favorite characters in uh the first the first uh part stargazers um is a historical character who I I think is often overlooked and I'm thrilled to see her in your book Laura Smith havland who is Laura Smith havland and what is her relationship with the Wilderness withth havin is as you have said um someone who I think deserves much more attention she was born a free white girl into a Quaker family and her family lived in different places when she was young in the north her growing up years that she remembers and and writes about in her autobiography were spent in New York and there she was doing a lot of reading she was doing a lot of walking and observing she was a very smart child as was har Tubman as were you know all all the girls in this book and Loris Smith havin was noticing through her reading and through her walking through town that black people were being terribly treated and as a child Laura Smith havland became um somebody who was very strongly passionately against the international slave trade and she became someone who noticed the physical mistreatment of black people fre black people on the streets of the New York town the upstate New York town where she was growing up and she was appalled appalled at the treatment of these uh individuals she also as a child really loved being outside and looking at the sky and this is why the chapter is called stargazers it follows many of these girls who were enslaved or who became strong anti-slavery Advocates and who had um a close emotional relationship and sexual relationship with the sky Lord Smith heaven was one of those she would look up at the sky and she would notice that no matter where she was if she was at home or if she was visiting relatives or if her family was on a trip she seemed to be at the center of the universe when she looked up she was always in the middle but she also recognized as a child that this didn't make sense because the universe could not revolve around her and in the book I talk about how this realization is something that I think she applied over the course of her life as she developed into a woman who was a fierce defender of black freedom and of black rights after the Civil War Laura Smith havind is the only white woman that we know of in the historical record who planned her own Escape effort mean she attempted on her own to go down south and to help a woman Escape that effort was not successful but her bravery still stands and was incredible and she made numerous trips to the South to the North she opened schools you know she was a teacher of formerly enslaved children and adults and she actually left her own children in Michigan for long periods of time while she did this Freedom work so she was somebody who was willing to put her her own life on the line and her and to to Really sacrifice her family's comfort for her beliefs well I love that you included it and I love that you um shared all of that about Laura because she is someone I I love to read about and I and it was really great to see her represented in your book I'm hoping we can transition a little bit to the next SE section of your book which is nature writers you include um Luis May elcot uh who is she grows up in Concord Massachusetts which is not a normal town and if you can kind of say why it's a little bit different than other places and we know her as a famed author and suffragist um at a very young age she loved the outdoors you give fantastic examples of um her literally needing needing to be tied down right uh can you talk a little bit about her and how nature played a role in her upbringing and who she became and who we now know as this important person in American history so Louis alot is a figure who many of us are familiar with because her bestselling 19th century novel Little Women is still a huge um selling novel today it's been made into numerous films and the home one of the homes in which he grew up Orchard House is a historic site that gives you know tens of thousands of visitors every year from from many countries Lou May Alcott is really a cherished author who is viewed as one of the major early figures of American children's writing and I argue in wild girls that it is no accident that Louisa May alot wrote Little Women a novel in which the main character the Beloved main character Joe March is always pushing cultural and social boundaries especially by going outside because alott was the same way Little Women was muddled after alcott's own experiences growing up and uh alcot was a girl she was a child who could not be tied down and yes Heather there there is there is a reminiscence there is a memory that her mother tried her mother actually at one point tied her two piece of furniture when they were living in Boston because Alcott was taking a number of risks as a very small child in Boston she was running away frequently to go to the park to you know go down to the warf to go see what was going on to hang out with big big dogs who she didn't know and her mother was trying to keep her safe so she took this um the step that seems extreme of tying her down but when Alcott was a little bit older still a child but a little bit older her family moved to conquered Massachusetts and this is a place that was um kind of in the country a beautiful quaint little town with trees and fields and meadows and the very famous Walen Pond was also a place where the American trans transcendentalist movement the philosophical literary movement um featuring people like Ralph Waldo Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David thow U were based and Louis Alcott had the benefit of actually knowing these famous men and hanging out with them Ian she would hang out with thorow on his boat before he wrote Wen Ponda before he was famous and this is where she wanted to be she wanted to be outside and Out in the Country her mother actually permitted this her mother allowed her to do this and she was outside exploring all the time Alcott was and she remembers how as a girl as a child she actually always felt more like a wild deer or a horse or a boy in the way that she just wanted to move her body she wanted to to be free physically she didn't want to wear all these skirts and these frilly things she wanted to run and explore and I think that these experiences Outdoors of pushing boundaries exploring led her to write this famous book that many people have enjoyed to this day that's wonderful and a great explanation as well what about Jane Johnston school craft uh why did you include her in her book she's really an interesting person a poet um can you share a little bit about about her yes so this chapter is about women who I deem nature writers and I came to that idea after thinking a lot about Louisa mayal Cott and realizing how important nature was to her writing but also how she was writing about nature this was not at first obvious to me that A Book Like Little Women is about nature as much as it is about uh the March family and the father being away the Civil War during the Civil War and the girls having to grow uh and learn who they were little Windam was very much about how domestic spaces related to outdoor natural and Wild Spaces and the gender roles attached to those spaces so once I had this notion that much of the writing that we view as cultural writing writing about Society written by women in this period of the late 19th century was also nature writing it was women recognizing that nature is intricately connected to culture and vice versa so once I had that frame I started thinking about here are some other women who were writing in this Century who were making that connection between nature and culture but but for whom we have missed the fact that they were making that connection and one of the women I thought of was Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft was an anab woman who was growing up in the Great Lakes we were talking about Michigan earlier Heather she was growing up around C St Marie Michigan and she was a part of a bicultural family she was a part of a family that had um a pattern for generations of native women Maring euroamerican men or european men and of course there are some complexities here that we don't have time to get into now but I just want to mark that these marriages and families weren't always necessarily fully chosen or W weren't always necessarily happy but this was Jane Johnston School crafts upbringing and it was also expected that she would uh probably marry a a white man and she did she married a white man who was um famous at the time Henry Rose Schoolcraft he was a scholar he was something of a of a lay Anthropologist and he wrote a book which was very widely read with his observations they appear to be his observations of Native American life and cultural ways well of course before I say this you're already going to be guessing that many of his observations were Jane Johnston schoolcrafts knowledge she told him any of these things and so she was sort of a silent um contributor on his book and she also was a poet in her own right she wrote many poems both in English and in Nish Moen which is their J language and these poems are oftentimes about nature her nature poems were at the same time critiques of society and I bring that into the chapter on nature writers as well so your last chapter is on game changers um I love that term um can you discuss one of your favorite game changers and why you chose to include that person in the book yes so the last chapter was um very different experience for me as a writer because it is very much about Athletics and about sports it's about a basketball team that was made up of indigenous girls at a federal boarding school for American Indian youth now I say that it was for these youth but we know that that relationship was fraught and uh it was in many cases coerced or compelled so native children were made to go to these schools and there were a number of methods for getting them there um which I go into in the book The girls who ended up going to Fort Shaw Indian school in Montana came from reservations in Montana and also in Idaho and they learned how to play basketball which was a new game at the time according to what were known as The Boys rules so in the The Boys rules you could move faster and uh everything was sharper and more competitive than with the girls rules for basketball and the young woman who brought the game of basketball to Fort Shaw school was a black feet teenager named Josephine Langley and Josephine was an incredible athlete she was also a wonderful student she was somebody who suffered from a a chronic illness as well she had troma which was um a contagious disease which which could affect the site and which was actually something that was spread around these schools because children were living in such Close Quarters they were often getting sick uh but despite this very difficult Challenge and limitation Josephine Langley did bring basketball to Fort Shaw school she gathered together a group of girls she taught them how to play basketball she set up an outdoor Court just using the things that she had and these girls who were taught by another girl taught by an older Team how to play basketball ended up beating every single Montana girls or Women's Basketball team and they also ended up becoming the world champions as they were called in basketball at the 1904 Worlds Fair in St Louis so this chapter goes into these girls as game changers showing how they were challenging stereotypes not only of girls and women and what they were capable of and what they could do but also of Native Americans so let's talk about your process um you have a lot of research in here it's very evident you have some you know pictures primary source material how did you go about working on this was it mostly inline did you go to a lot of archives um how did you how did you attack this task well I I love this question I love talking about process I love talking about the research and um for this book which I think of almost as an album of portraits it's sort of a compilation of these incredible girls and what they did and how they did it in nature I was really thinking back to some girls and women who I already knew to a certain extent I mentioned that I had already read about Harriet tuen many years ago as as a part of my research on slavery in the United States I had already written an article published an article about Laura Smith havland I had taught about the for oh here's my talk down here I don't know if you all can see her she just came to visit um I had tght about the for sha school and also about the recting boarding schools in my classes and so I had a number of primary source materials that were already collected for many of the girls and women about whom I wrote I also for the research went back and tried to identify new material now I started this um during the height of covid as I mentioned and so during that time I I could not go into many archives but I could go to historic sites and one of the things that I remember that just stands out for me is how it was that I decided to include Louisa May Alcott in this book alcot is not somebody I had ever researched or written about before but my family and I live in Cambridge Massachusetts and as I mentioned at the start of our conversation we were feeling very cooped up and I knew that my kids needed to to get out of not just the house but also our neighborhood and so I said I don't even know why I said this e i let's go to Orchard House let's go to Orchard House and and it was closed and I knew we could get in but I wanted my kids just to walk around the ground so we did and I was outside of Orchard House which I had been inside of before but all of a sudden I was seeing the house from that exterior view seeing the house against the trees and against the landscape seeing the garden really seeing the garden that's been uh replicated there and that Louis May Alcott would have worked in and I thought Alcott needs to be aart of this book I thought about her in a totally different way and then later on I was able to have the the really wonderful moving experience of visiting the historic sites that related to many of the girls who were on that forch basketball team tracing their sites across Montana and at the same time tracing the places where sya would have been when she was an important member of of the lisis and Clark expedition so primary research in the documents in the memoirs and um on the ground research at the historic sit so is how I worked on that book it's extraordinary well thank you so much for sharing about this book I have a few more questions for you one uh quickly what are you working on now do you have something you can share with us about a new project yes this will not surprise you I'm sure that I'm working on a biography of Harriet Tubman and her spiritual relationship to Nature right now I'm very excited for the project completely immersed in that project and I can't wait to get it done and to share it with people oh that's so exciting well hopefully we'll see you again once it comes out perfect it would be perfect um do you have a favorite Library I do have a favorite Li I have many favorite libraries actually because uh there's so many libraries that have been important in my life I will say that the downtown library the main branch of the library in Cincinnati Ohio is the place where when I was a girl I would hang out all the time take the city bus there get off the bus go into the library and just let my imagination run into all these directions that you'd be probably surprised to hear about if I were to descri them to you and then afterwards if I had a little money I would go across the street to fishes and enjoy my favorite dessert of the time which was a hot fudge cake well I love that and one of the things I know is that as much as I talk to authors they always have a favorite library and usually it's a library they went to as a kid and so I think about the important role of libraries and American society as we think about the important role of the outdoors in creating the America we know today um it's important to think about the role of libraries as well and as authors tell those stories how libraries help them to get to the space that they can write and tell um this conversation has been extraordinary I'm so appre itive that you you took the time to share your insights your work with all of us um and I hope to have you on the show again to be able to share more about Harriet Tubman um and we have to close the program but before we do are there any last takeaways you'd like to share with the viewers yes you were just talking about libraries and that led me to just want to mention that in the conclusion of the book I talk about some women who were girls Outdoors who became incredibly important to social change movements in the 20th century and one of those women is Octavia Butler I don't think many people necessarily know that she was an environmentalist that in her journals which are in an archive at the Huntington Library she was always writing down nature notations and expressing her concern for the environment and she was absolutely in love with her local library the downtown library in LA I love that and that is a great note to close on well thank you so much I also want to thank all of our viewers out there and our amazing library and Museum network of Partners numerous PBS stations for sharing this important content with all of you but most importantly we'd like to thank all of you for joining us well just a reminder I just was speaking with t miles author of wild girls how they outdoor shape the women who challenged a nation the other reminder is that on PBS right now you can really you can get so much amazing content about history science about the environment about the change delve in go to PBS.org and enjoy and