Taking John Quincy Adams to Alaska

I recently took John Quincy Adams to Alaska with me. He’d spent a good chunk of the first part of his life traveling through Europe and was more traveled than most people of his era. But he’d never been to Alaska and I felt bad about that. And as I happened to be heading that way, I thought I’d take him with me. It wasn’t much of an inconvenience. I tucked him inside my backpack. He didn’t seem to mind. At some point this year, I decided that I should spend some of my reading time going through primary sources. I’d re-read some of Stephen Jay Gould’s essay collections and was impressed by how frequently he went to primary sources, even in preparing for his essays. I realized that as widely as I have read in science, history, and biography, I rarely tackled primary sources. The Library of America two volume set of John Quincy Adams Diaries sit near my desk and I decided that those would be the first primary source to tackle. My first significant encounter with the sixth President of…