Drew Faust
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Articles by Drew Faust
The Slave’s Power
The Slave’s Power Published September 27, 2026 Reviewed: Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans by Susan Eva O’Donovan Penguin Press, 369 pp., $35.00 A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely Henry Holt, 352 pp., $31.99 For nearly two decades now, historians have been debating whether it is even possible to write the history of American slavery.
New Discoveries in the Archive of Slavery
For nearly two decades now, historians have been debating whether it is even possible to write the history of American slavery. Can an accurate story of a system of oppression be derived from sources created and preserved by the oppressors? In many ways it is a surprising controversy.
Imperatives of Freedom
In the final words of the Declaration of Independence, the 56 signers “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” These men knew they were risking all three. Their defiance of the Crown could be prosecuted as treason, and who knew what other costs might ensue for daring to create a new nation?
AMERICA AT 250: Kansas figured in embattled president's fate
America at 250 James Buchanan is customarily regarded as one of the worst American presidents, assailed for his failure to act to prevent southern secession during his 120 days as a lame duck after Lincoln’s election in November, 1860. Yet Buchanan took office as one of the most experienced politicians ever to enter the White House. He had served as a Pennsylvania state legislator, congressman, senator, ambassador to both Russia and Great Britain, and secretary of state.
Deadlier Than Gettysburg
Deadlier Than Gettysburg Published February 15, 2026 The Civil War isn’t what it used to be.
Deadlier Than Gettysburg
Listen1.0x 0:0014:57 The Civil War isn’t what it used to be.
Deadlier Than Gettysburg
3 hours ago Shaming the dead is an asinine culture warriors’ pastime. Now it’s the great diarist Samuel Pepys’s turn. Andrew Doyle is the author of “Free Speech and Why It Matters” and “The New Puritans.” Samuel Pepys was, famously, an extraordinary diarist, offering a vivid first-hand account of life in …
No One Gave a Speech Like Patrick Henry
Patrick Henry is generally treated as a second-string Founding Father. He didn’t write—or even sign—the Declaration of Independence. He didn’t write the Constitution. Instead, fearing that it allocated too much power to a centralized government, he did all he could to defeat it. He was not a Revolutionary military hero. He did not explain lightning, invent bifocals, take Paris by diplomatic storm, or write an autobiography that has become a classic in American literature.
We Are Not Being Asked to Run Into Cannon Fire. We Just Need to Speak Up. Original
Frederick Douglass thought Decoration Day - the original name for Memorial Day - was the nation's most significant holiday. On May 30, 1871, the day's fourth annual observance, he honored the unknown Union dead at Arlington National Cemetery, addressing President Grant, members of his cabinet and a crowd of dignitaries surrounded by graves adorned with spring flowers.
Fiction Makes Us Kinder with Chris Bohjalian
The Book Maven is back with another important conversation about finding empathy in our writing. In this episode, Bethanne Patrick talks to Chris Bohjalian about his newest novel The Jackal’s Mistress. They discuss recounting difficult historic events, finding empathy through fiction, and the process of researching information for this book.
The Strange Ritual of Commencement Speeches Original
They appear every spring, like crocuses or robins or perhaps black flies: commencement addresses. Thousands of them, across the country and across the variety of American higher education—two-year schools, four-year schools, small colleges, universities both public and private, schools of every kind. And they will appear again, despite how unusual this spring has been. Many campuses have been roiled by protests about the war in Gaza, and some institutions will curtail graduation ceremonies.
Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury
Former Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust had previously written a beautiful book on the first photographs that came from the killing fields of the Civil War. These photos captured the deep destruction of death that changed the national attitude about dying on American soil. Faust has now turned her pen to her own family’s history of living in the South and her coming of age as a Baby Boomer who challenged her upbringing and Southern social norms during the Civil Rights movement.
The Daily Responsibility of Democracy
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Much of America’s politics has descended into ignorant, juvenile stunts that distract us from the existential danger facing democracy. Citizens must take up the burden of being the adults in the room.
The Men Who Started the Civil War
Updated at 3:28 p.m. ET on January 8, 2024 Harpers Ferry seemed almost a part of the neighborhood when I was growing up. Granted, it was across the state line, in West Virginia, and slightly more than a half-hour drive away from our Virginia farm. But it took us almost that long to get to the nearest supermarket. And I felt connected by more than roads.
Necessary Trouble
Media Reviews Reader Reviews Page 1 of 1 There is 1 reader review for Necessary Trouble Write your own review! Penelope Murnane Coming of Age in Mid-20th Century I read this book after seeing the author, interviewed recently about it. I actually listened to it on the Libby app. It was read by the author so it was very well-read. She begins with her story of her mother and how she met her husband and the choices her mother made given society's roles for women.
A Turn to the Dark Side
A decade and a half ago, I published This Republic of Suffering, a book about death and the American Civil War. I had been moved to write it after encountering the diaries and letters of southern women, whose voices rang clear and strong across the century and a half that separated us.
How the Vietnam War Accelerated Generational Divides in America
“It is especially appropriate that we American students, fighting for the right to determine our own future, support the right of self determination throughout the world and call for international opposition to the war in Vietnam.” —The College News, Bryn Mawr College, March 17, 1967 On April 17, 1965, I attended my first antiwar rally in Washington, D.C. I have lost track of how many Vietnam protests I participated in during the next half decade.
Drew Gilpin Faust - Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury - with Lissa Muscatine - at Conn Ave
To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions--not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans' lives. To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender.
Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury
Necessary Trouble is both an engaging memoir and an essential social history. Readers will find it a book well worth reading on both counts. Author Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, began her academic career as an historian, an area of interest that perhaps was inevitable. A sense of the past permeated every aspect of her childhood in Virginia horse country. “I knew I lived in history,” she writes.
What Life Magazine Taught Me About Life
I grew up in the 1950s, on a farm in Virginia miles away from any town or neighbors. For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television, so my three brothers and I amused ourselves fighting pretend Civil War battles in the fields and woods around our house or vying over card and board games that we spread across the living-room floor. But for me, the best entertainment was always reading. I read for pleasure, for company, and for escape from my contained Virginia world.
The Magazine That Was a Window on America
As a child, I saw the country in its photos, stories, and advertisements—and learned some hard truths about America. I grew up in the 1950s, on a farm in Virginia miles away from any town or neighbors. For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television, so my three brothers and I amused ourselves fighting pretend Civil War battles in the fields and woods around our house or vying over card and board games that we spread across the living-room floor.
Getting Close, in Selma
Your independent source for Harvard news since 1898 | SUBSCRIBE Log-in | Register Articles News more News The dawn of the virtual teaching fellow 8.10.23 Research more Research Students Alumni Harvard Squared Opinion more Opinion The messages and meanings of Harvard’s presidential installations September-October 2023 A semester abroad clarifies the value of the curriculum back home.
An Interview With David Epstein
I first published this interview with in May 2020. Of all the interviews I’ve done, this one is among my favorite. I’ve added a lot of readers since then, so I thought it would be fun to re-share. Enjoy! 1) Your current work revolves around the idea of range — why being a generalist is better than being a specialist. What book(s) have most shaped your thinking in that realm of thought?
NECESSARY TROUBLE
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power. Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia).
The Roundup Top Ten for December 9, 2022
; 12/9/2022 Roundup The Blindness of the Supreme Court's "Colorblindness" by Drew Gilpin Faust "Affirmative action opened a door I would walk through....
What Students Lost When They Stopped Learning Cursive
What Students Lost When They Stopped Learning Cursive NPR's Michel Martin speaks with historian Drew Gilpin Faust about her story in The Atlantic, "Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive." Read Full Article »
The Blindness of 'Color-Blindness' Original
I needed to be in the room. I wanted to witness the next chapter in a story that mattered to me, one that I had even been a part of. And as a historian, I wanted to be there as it happened—I had to see and hear firsthand what I once thought was unimaginable. Affirmative action has been implemented in its various forms for well over half a century, for 75 percent of my existence, for nearly 40 percent of the years since the Emancipation Proclamation.
Review: ‘The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family’
“Our family, Black and white.” For the slaveholding class of the old South, it was a familiar trope, one intended to convey both mastery and benevolence, to hide the reality of raw power and exploitation behind an ideology of paternalistic concern and natural racial hierarchy. There was profound irony in the white South’s choice of this image, for the words were far from simply figurative: They revealed the very truths they were designed to hide.
Review: Reevaluating the Grimke Sisters and White Abolitionism
SOURCE: The Atlantic 11/8/2022 Historians in the News tags: slavery, abolition, Sarah Grimke, Angelina Grimke by Drew Gilpin Faust Drew Gilpin Faust is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and a former president of Harvard University, where she is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. She is the author of six books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family KERRI K.
The Roundup Top Ten for September 23, 2022
; 9/23/2022 Roundup Governors DeSantis and Abbott Borrow from the Jim Crow Playbook by Greta de Jong "Immigration scholars have noted how U.S. foreign policies contributed to the poverty and violence in Central and South America that migrants are fleeing.
Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive
How will they interpret the past?
Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive
It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren't very helpful to him, because of course he couldn't read cursive. Had I heard him correctly? Who else can't read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can't write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures?
White and Black: A Historian Traces African-American Influences in the United States
AFRICAN FOUNDERS How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals By David Hackett Fischer During more than half a century as a professor and a scholar, David Hackett Fischer has published 11 books, received multiple awards for his teaching and won a Pulitzer Prize. Now he has delivered the long-promised “companion volume” to “Albion’s Seed,” a work that appeared in 1989 to both acclaim and searing criticism.
Linda Hirshman Offers a Lively Dissection of the Competing Strains of American Abolitionism
; SOURCE: Washington Post 3/25/2022 Historians in the News tags: slavery, books, abolition, Frederick Douglass, womens history, Maria Weston Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison by Drew Gilpin Faust Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University professor and President Emerita at Harvard University. She is the author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.
Getting Close to the Past
Clint Smith, who received a Ph.D. in education from Harvard in 2020, has written an important and timely book about race in America. But How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America is also a book about education: what we know and what we don’t, what we choose to remember and what we prefer to erase, silence, or forget.
100 Excellent History Books Written by Women
The 100 Excellent History Books Written by Women list has been created to help promote history authored by women here at listmuse. We aim to include a substantial number of history books written by women in our history book lists but we felt it was worth having a seperate list entirely devoted to excellent history books written by female historians.
Review: ‘The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War’ by Michael Gorra
A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it. In June 2005, Oprah Winfrey announced a surprising choice as the 55th selection for her influential book club. The coming months would be, she proclaimed, a “Summer of Faulkner,” focused on three of his novels—As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August, available in a special 1,100-page box set weighing in at two pounds.
Dark Victories
Dark Victories This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95 Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death by Mark S. Schantz Cornell University Press, 245 pp., $24.95 Americans on the eve of the Civil War were no strangers to death. Life expectancy at birth was forty years, largely because of an infant and child mortality rate nearly ten times as great as today.
The coronavirus will force us to change how we mourn
Updated April 13, 2020 2:00 PM Newsday is opening this story to all readers so Long Islanders have access to important information about the coronavirus outbreak. All readers can learn the latest news at newsday.com/LiveUpdates. As the covid-19 death toll mounts, we are forcefully reminded that humans are bound together by their mortality. Throughout history, they have struggled to face their own deaths and to explain and endure the deaths of others.
Perspective | The coronavirus will force us to change how we mourn
As the covid-19 death toll mounts, we are forcefully reminded that humans are bound together by their mortality. Throughout history, they have struggled to face their own deaths and to explain and endure the deaths of others. Different eras and different social, economic, political and religious circumstances have shaped how we die and how we mourn. Yet death has presented similar challenges across time and space: What do we do with the bodies?
Discover Our Shared Heritage Travel Itinerary
These military statistics, however, tell only a part of the story. The war also killed a significant number of civilians; battles raged across farm and field, encampments of troops spread epidemic disease, guerrillas ensnared women and children in violence and reprisals, draft rioters targeted innocent citizens, and shortages of food in parts of the South brought starvation. No one sought to document these deaths systematically, and no one has devised a method of undertaking a retrospective count.
Review | How slavery warped Jefferson’s vision for the University of Virginia
Drew Faust is president emerita and Arthur Kingsley Porter university professor at Harvard. In recent years, America’s oldest universities have begun to explore and confront their deep historical ties to slavery.
Historian Drew Gilpin Faust Pens Personal and Historical Essay: "Race, History, and Memories of a Virginia Girlhood"
; SOURCE: The Atlantic Accessed 7/18/19 Historians in the News tags: racism, Race, Virginia, desegregation by Drew Gilpin Faust Drew Gilpin Faust, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, is a former president of Harvard University, where she is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. She is the author of six books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. ... The year 1957 was a crucial time in Virginia and in the South generally.
Race, History, and Memories of a Virginia Girlhood
We stopped first at the cemetery. My brother had picked me up at the Philadelphia airport, and we had driven south and west from there—to Baltimore and Frederick, then down through the hills of the Blue Ridge, past the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers at Harpers Ferry and into the Valley of Virginia. Civil War country. The route of the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns. The site of John Brown’s incendiary attempt to foment a slave uprising. The place where we grew up.
Portrait of a Bounder
Portrait of a Bounder James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery by Drew Faust Louisiana State University Press, 407 pp., $27.50 Antebellum South Carolina was different from the rest of the South.
The Scholar Who Shaped History
The Scholar Who Shaped History The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis Knopf, 422 pp., $30.00 Granger Collection‘Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia’; painting by Eyre Crowe, 1861 Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation’s history.
The Case for College
As delivered. Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here in Dallas, and I so appreciate Richard’s words and Molly’s words and also the remarkable performance that preceded them. I also want to thank everyone at this school and beyond who made this event possible today. I know it took a lot of work and I am very grateful to be the beneficiary of that. I am especially delighted to be here with you at a school named after Booker T. Washington.
‘The War for the Common Soldier’ and ‘The Calculus of Violence’ Review: Billy Yank and Johnny Reb
Historians of the Civil War have long debated its place in the evolution of warfare. Was it at once the last old-fashioned war and the first modern one? Was it a total war presaging the carnage of World War I almost a half-century later? How profoundly did its violence transform the men and the nation that fought it? Two new books address these questions from different perspectives, but both conclude that the changes the Civil War inaugurated were limited in their impact.
Table of Contents - October 25, 2018
Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad and Criminal in 19th-Century New York by Stacy Horn Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity by Theodore M. Porter No One Cares About Crazy People: My Family and the Heartbreak of Mental Illness in America by Ron Powers Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness by Alisa Roth
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