From smuggling to comparative religion

And all I had to do was hop over a couple of portraits to a different part of the same wall:

Hannah Adams, painted by Chester Harding, collection of the Boston Athenaeum

Although, much more awesomely, Hannah Adams has also been featured in a Wonder Woman issue:

courtesy of http://comicvine.gamespot.com/hannah-adams/4005-80183/

My Perkins biography was well-received, and I made a short version of it to be recorded for the iPhone app that the Athenaeum Director of Education has been developing for self-guided tours.

I've now moved on to documenting the life, fascinating controversies, and work of Hannah Adams (1755-1831). She is (relatively) famous as the first woman to make her living as a writer in America. (Not the first one to publish, but the first for whom it wasn't just a hobby.) She also was a major pioneer in the field of comparative religion, which until her time had been less of a scholarly exercise and more of an excuse for clerics to write incredibly insulting things about other religions and why Christianity was better. She is also tied to the founding of the Unitarian Church, and was supported by some of the most significant wealthy Federalists in Boston. She didn't make it to be that important without suffering -- from living in poverty, to waging unsuccessful copyright battles, to coming head-to-head with some of the scariest ministers in New England, she had to have some serious spunk to get as far as she did. Not bad for a woman of her time, especially one who who was constantly ill, had no formal education, and tended to accidentally stay at the Athenaeum until after it was closed in the evenings because reading was virtually her entire life. In other words, an excellent proto-nerd.