Blair Niles

At age 14, Blair attended the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies in Massachusetts[2] and then the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she studied domestic science.

Within the first year of their marriage, they went on three honeymoon expeditions: to Nova Scotia, Oak Lodge,[3] a boarding house for naturalists on the Indian River in Florida, and to Cobb Island, Virginia.

When they published Our Search for Wilderness about their South American travels,[6] Blair received the recognition she long desired: she was credited as a co-author, with her name listed first.

Their plans to establish a Tropical Field Station in South America were interrupted when they received an offer from Anthony Kuser to underwrite an eighteen-month expedition to Asia to study and collect pheasants.

They traveled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Burma (Myanmar), India, China, Borneo, Indonesia, Malay, Japan, and Singapore.

[8] Her breakthrough book was Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa's Eldest Daughter (1926), which told the story of the largest slave revolt in history led by Toussaint L'Overture.

On the centennial of the Supreme Court's United States v. The Amistad decision, Blair wrote a novel that introduced a new generation to the Court's decision, which held that kidnapped Africans were not the property of their “owners.” The book, called East by Day, was selected as one of twenty books by readers of the New York Herald for Great Britain readers.

She knew that her grandfather, Roger Atkinson Pryor, spoke in Charleston, South Carolina urging the Confederates to open fire on Fort Sumter to force Virginia into secession.

According to The New York Times, this speech was the “match that exploded the powder magazine and brought on the war.”[10] As one of Confederate General Beauregard's aides-de-camp, Roger declined the offer to fire the first cannon of the Civil War.

The organization grew rapidly and admitted as members such illustrious women as Amelia Earhart, Margaret Mead, Osa Johnson, Annie Smith Peck, Louise Arner Boyd, Josephine Peary, Pearl S. Buck, Malvina Hoffman, Gloria Hollister, Anna Heyward Taylor, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Te Ata, Membership was not limited to explorers, but included anyone whose published works (including art and music) contributed to the understanding of the countries on which the member specialized.