Ever been obsessed with a historical figure? Meet the historian who found a lifelong friend in John Quincy Adams.

Detailed summary

For Gwen Fries, a documentary editor at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Adams was more than just the sixth president of the United States.

For one week during COVID-19, historian Gwen Fries lived life almost exactly as John Quincy Adams did.

She woke before sunrise. She read the books he did. She followed his exercise routine and translated The Book of Psalms from German to English. But there was one part of Adams’s daily regimen she couldn’t bring herself to emulate: his skinny-dipping habit.

Adams swam naked in the Charles River each morning to help blood circulation, Fries explained. She took freezing-cold showers instead.

A documentary editor at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Fries immerses herself in the lives of people who have been deceased for nearly two centuries. Through the details they left behind and the thoughts they committed to paper, her work brings them back to life.

But for Fries, Adams was more than just the sixth president of the United States.

After 10 years of studying his habits, ambitions, and quirks, she has come to know him intimately: a perfectionist; a relentless diarist; a father who fell short; and, occasionally, a man who swam naked in the Charles.

Fries, 32, grew up in Pottsville, Pa., the home of Yuengling, the oldest operating brewery in the country.

Sitting in the historical society’s Dowse Library, she perched forward in her chair with a nervous excitement, her shoulder-length brown hair skimming a green Patagonia jacket.

Fries’s fascination with Adams began during her freshman year of high school, when she stumbled upon HBO’s seven-part miniseries about John Adams, his father. But while watching it, she wasn’t as captivated by the Founding Father as she was by the little boy whose feet couldn’t touch the ground of the ornate chair he sat in.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Boston Globe. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.