Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

Memorials nationwide pay homage to Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, and Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s indispensable Shoshone guide, all of whom charted new trails at enormous risk. But Julia Archibald remains largely forgotten, along with dozens of other intrepid women. Amanda Berry Smith, a former slave, crisscrossed four continents in the late nineteenth century as a missionary and educator, and her autobiography contains some of the earliest writings by any American on customs and daily life in remote African villages. Inspired by her globe-trotting father, Hawaiian-born Annie Montague Alexander traveled almost nonstop gathering fossils and hunting live animals for scientific study. She donated her massive collection along with considerable funding to create the Museum of Paleontology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, both in Berkeley, California. While Alexander was digging up bones and shooting wild animals (the Alaskan bear Ursus alexandrae is named after her), botanist Ynes Mexia was logging thousands of miles in Mexico and South America collecting 150,000 plant specimens. And in the spirit of Julia Archibald, a fifty-eight-year-old mountaineer named Annie Smith Peck was the first person of either gender to summit Peru’s 22,205-foot Mount Huascarán. A year later, in 1909, she planted a VOTES FOR WOMEN banner atop Peru’s Mount Coropuna.