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NHA University Virtual Event: Not Just a Practical Navigator: A New Look at Nathaniel Bowditch, 19th-Century Numbers Man
April 20, 2021 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
In an illustrated talk, historian and biographer Tamara Plakins Thornton offers a fresh look at the life and work of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), the author of the New American Practical Navigator, for decades the must-have manual for America’s sailors. Thomas Jefferson celebrated the Salem-born astronomer as “a meteor of the hemisphere,” but Bowditch was also a prominent business executive whose devotion to systems that ran with clockwork regularity shaped the faceless bureaucracies of modern life. Come meet this peppery Yankee, who voyaged around the globe, became a Fellow of London’s Royal Society, pioneered the modern trust, and even shook up Harvard.
Free for members, $5 for nonmembers. Held via Zoom
For more information, click here.