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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
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