Riverfest weekend will kick off on Friday, April 20 with a talk by James Zug ’91​, author of The Life and Adventures of John Ledyard, the Man who Dreamed of Walking the World. Zug, whose work has been featured in The Daily Beast and Vanity Fair, will discuss John Ledyard, the “original American explorer,” who Thomas Jefferson called a “man of genius” and was the first American to see Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest. Zug’s talk will take place in Collis 101 with facsimiles of archived papers from Ledyard Canoe Club’s history, and there will be three complementary exhibits in the Rauner Special Collections Library of materials from the Club’s past, curated by Jaime Eeg ‘18.