War and narrative in some sense create one another. I was fascinated by how anybody could do such a thing and the bases on which they justified this to themselves and how they came to see the world in this way. Faust emphasized that our commitment to education can not only better ourselves, but our world at large. A specialist in the history of the South in the antebellum period and Civil War, Faust rose to become Walter Annenberg Professor of History. . Drew Gilpin Faust is the 28th President of Harvard University and the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I decided to go back to graduate school. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible and the infinite, the animal, the spiritual and the divine. So, nullification emerged in that context and was really a precursor of the language of states rights and secession that followed it a few decades later. So, thats one set of attributes. As two of the university's most prominent female leaders, they also agreed on the power of example and on the importance of inclusive leadership. For the Civil War, it was perhaps Robert E. Lee who captured this contradiction most memorably in his often and variously quoted remark to James Longstreet as they watched the slaughter at Fredericksburg in 1862. Drew Gilpin Faust [1]In 2007 American scholar Drew Gilpin Faust [2] (born 1947) . - Raised in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Drew Gilpin Faust attended Concord Academy in Massachusetts. From comments of astonished pundits on television, in print, and online, to conversations with bewildered friends and colleagues, the question seems unavoidableand mesmerizing: What is going on? Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Putting issues of race and inequality front and center in the American present meant putting them front and center in the American past as well. The centennial commemoration of Antietam was designed to be less about remembrance than about forgetting. The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, had been of even greater significance in the war than either first or second Bull Run. The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman and the superhuman. We have a very special obligation in a very difficult time. Shelby Foote used the word crossroads to describe the Civil War. The search for understanding compels language even as it rejects it. from froth-corrupted lungs, the dying flung into wagons, the living left lame and blind. We had many of those: the old mill in Millwood from the eighteenth century; Carter Hall, up on the hill that we had known had been an important outpost of the Carter family from the Tidewater. Widener and Memorial Church. But from Homer to Whitman to Owen to Heller to those telling the stories of our wars today, we have grappled to use the humanity of words to understand the inhumanity of war. His opening sentence thus united the two documents as foundational to the meaning of the war and to Kings definition of America. She revealed in stunning detail how these women struggled against their fate, not as proto-feminists, but as women undergoing transformations for which they were psychologically unprepared. Drew Gilpin Faust President (2007-2018), Harvard University 1968, BA, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; 1971, MA, and 1975, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Perhaps it was these very women, writing thousands of letters to their men at the front, who persuaded the soldiers, themselves fearful of the physical and social destruction on the home front, to give up the fight. Seeing beyond ourselves enables us to imagine and act on behalf of a different future.. Faust is one of the world's leading historians on gender issues in 19th century America. And I used that perception of womens changing views of the war to suggest that this may have been a real factor in the erosion of the Confederate army. Fighting on the other side of the same war, and equally compelled to write, Tim OBrien confronts a similar sense of the difficulties of language and of narrative. From across the Universitygraduate, professional, and hundreds of undergraduateswe see a remarkable enthusiasm, for example for the field of global health because it unites the power of knowledge and science with a deeply-felt desire to do good in the worldto lead lives of meaning and purpose. We look at Widener Library and see a great edifice, a backdrop of giant columns where photos are taken and 27 steps are worn down ever so slightly by the feet of a century of students and scholars. Those years in the early 1960s were not just a historic anniversary but themselves a time of history making. One of the most striking aspects of the Civil War in my mind is why the North fought. So often, I have found, men describe themselves as beyond feeling or comprehension, numbed by their experience, yet nevertheless seeking a means to convey its significance and impact. May we and the students we send forth today embrace it. Hope. overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= This abundantly documented life also yielded an exceptional view into Southern society: its codes of honor, the rigors of political advancement, and glimpses of the private lives of slaves. One was the presence of the Civil War and living on a highway called the Lee-Jackson Highway. FAUST: When I began studying history at Bryn Mawr, it was a very traditional history curriculum in which wide preparation in European history was required. An increasing interest in the lives of ordinary Americans during the years of conflict has included a great deal of research and writing about what happened beyond the battlefield, on the homefront, in communities and families North and South. Memory and history focused on battles, glory and sacrifice, with still divisive issues of race pushed largely aside in deference to white southern custom and sentiment. We must be unassailable in our insistence that ideas most fully thrive and grow when they are open to challenge. Several thousand men clad in blue and gray had assembled on the field where two major encounters of the war had been fought to perform, as a New York Times reporter described it, a dramatic rsum of the battles highlights. Perched in bleachers and grandstands or milling in an adjacent field of refreshment tents and folding chairs, an enthusiastic crowd had cheered victorious Confederates and booed fleeing Union troops, just as Virginians had hailed their predecessors a century before. [24] In early 2009, the Harvard Corporation approved salary freezes for the president, deans, senior officers, management staff, and faculty, and offered an early retirement program. Is your emphasis on the original word, or is the emphasis on the context in which the word is made? As OBrien and Bao Ninh and countless others through the ages have recognized, there remains a fundamental un-tellability and unintelligibility about war in its resistance to language, in its refusal to rest within the bounds and shape of narrative. LEACH: You went to prep school in Massachusetts, college at Bryn Mawr, and then graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. . '02,will join the University as senior adviser to the president on engagement with Historically Black . She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. This Republic of Suffering (2008) was a critically acclaimed exploration of how the United States' understanding of death was shaped by the high losses during the Civil War. She spoke on humilitys role in the work of becoming educated. And as I wrote that first book, James Henry Hammond being one of the individuals I studied, he rose to the fore in my mind as an individual who, as a plantation owner, as a senator, as a governor, as a writer and intellectual, offered windows into so many aspects of the South in the pre-Civil War and the Civil War era. [29], Faust is married to Charles E. Rosenberg, a historian of medicine at Harvard. In myriad ways we challenge our students to be individuals of character as well as of learning. One of the most forceful of wars attractions to its chroniclers is the very impossibility of their task. But what will they understand of war? Gilpin grew up in Virginias Shenandoah Valley, where her parents raised Thoroughbred horses. C. Vann Woodward was at Hopkins before he ended up at Yale. In his famous speech, The Soldiers Faith, the Civil War veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., confidently announced in 1895: It is our business to fight, the book of the army is a war-song, not a hospital-sketch. Not so, argued Faust: Before singing a war song, we might first listen to a Union surgeons description of the fields at Antietam a week after the battle: The dead were almost wholly unburied . Responding to terrorism with war replaced the specter and fear of mass murder with a hope for the controlled, ordered force of war. For this distinction, her remarkable career should be recognized and studied as a story of ambitious and graceful achievement. Learning is a result of the understanding that there is always more that we do not know. Drew Faust2021 And that gave me a new perspective on what it must have meant in American society in the 1860s. And significant segments of the American population, particularly in the South, continue to reject slavery as a fundamental cause of the war, even in the face of irrefutable evidence that what southerners called the peculiar institution played a critical role in secession debates, declarations, and decisions across the South. She is the author of six books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996), for which she won both the Society of American Historians Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians in 1997. FAUST: I felt very much that I lived in historyin a couple of different ways. She is also the Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. She retains her title as a professor of history at Harvard. And the opening of citizenship to individuals who had been excluded from it. She broadened the University's international reach, [] It offered the United States the sense of intention, the goal-directedness and lure of efficacy that war promises and terrorism obliterates. On Friday, she came to Girls High to tell students they can do anything. Humility. The Morrill Act seems to me consistent with those. And when Lincoln articulated that, he was able to mobilize the North to fight an expensive and devastating war. A year later, she entered graduate school in history and American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, and achieved her PhD in 1975 at the tender age of 27. The reason I mention this is that in 1989 you made quite a mark with the argument you presented to historians that an underestimated explanation of why the Civil War ended in the manner it did may have related to the role women played in convincing the menfolk to cease and desist. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. She supervised a major campus expansion in nearby Boston, assessment and expansion of the role of the arts in the university, and continuation of work on a substantial revision of the undergraduate curriculum. And David Donald taught at Hopkins before he came to Harvard. She was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard and the first to have been raised in the South. Event Date June 13, 2019 Notes 1976-2000, Assistant Professor to Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. From prep school onward, Faust was educated in the North, but she found her academic interest gravitate to the South. She has enjoyed good health since then. The move reduced the use of irrigation water by 30%, made Harvard Yard greener, and improved the health of the campus orchard. So, I had a very special version of the Civil War story told to me when I was little. But why havent we Civil War historians been equally preoccupied with death? Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947) is an American historian and was the 28th President of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. Mothers of Invention undoubtedly led Faust to her next major subject. We had travelled through the familiar historic landscape of Stonewall Jacksons skirmishes, Mosbys raids, Sheridans ride, and John Browns capture and hanging to witness the centennial reenactment of the Battle of Antietam. Diaries, letters, and business records furnished a superb record of Hammonds rise from near poverty to social success as a politician and the master of a large plantation. We must acknowledge both its horror and its attraction if we hope to understand the contradictions in its impact and presence in human lives. [16], In addition to promoting access to higher education, Faust has testified before the U.S. Congress to promote increased funding for scientific research and support of junior faculty researchers. The growing force of black voices in the 1960s and the reinsertion of race into national discourse and the national agenda necessarily challenged the prevailing narrative of the war. In the enthusiasm of students and faculty, we see it as well. American universities have long struggled to meet almost irreconcilable demands: to be practical as well as transcendent; to assist immediate national needs and to pursue knowledge for its own sake; to both add value and question values. But here were slaves clearly affirming long and deeply held family ties. Faust is the first woman to serve as Harvard president and the university's 28th president overall. What is happening to the world? overrideTextColor= It is well that war is so terrible, Lee observed, else we should grow too fond of it. Lees ambivalence, his complexity, his capacity for irony are in one sense surprising here, for he has been extolled and is best remembered as the wars romantic hero, a man of decisiveness and little doubt. Faust is the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. naming . Our route was in fact not very different from the one both Jackson and A.P. She was the first woman to hold the office and the first president since the 17th century who did not have a Harvard degree. The world economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama will change the future of higher education. Prevailing discourse emphasises the university as a paramount player in a global system increasingly driven by knowledge, information and ideas. This was the norm when we were growing up. Its fascination lies in its ability at once to allure and repel, in the paradox that thrives at its heart. Rosenberg was Faust's dissertation advisor. Built in the aftermath of World War I, it was intended to honor and memorialize responsibilitynot just the quality of men and womens thoughts, but, as my predecessor James Conant put it, the radiance of their deeds. The more than 1,100 Harvard and Radcliffe students, faculty, and alumni whose names are engraved on its walls gave their lives in service to their country, because they believed that some things had greater value than their own individual lives. . There is no algorithm that writes itself. You cant tell where you are, or why youre there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. As the political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain has put it, War imitates narratives imitating war. John Keegan, who for twenty six years served as an instructor at the British Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, has offered an example central to historical writing in his description of the battle piece. This highly conventionalized, heroic account of combat has shaped not just the rhetoric and assumptions of military history, but more powerfully and more dangerously, the understanding and seduction of war itself. She earned a BA magna cum laude with honors in history from Bryn Mawr College in 1968. As Ernest Hemingway once explained to F. Scott Fitzgerald, War is the best subject of all. It was just taken for granted. And those might, for example, be demographic. Old, indeed: The words are taken from an ode by Horace and were 2,000 years later inscribed on the wall of the chapel at Sandhurst for aspiring young soldiers soon to be headed for the trenches of France. FAUST: It does, and its one that Ive quoted or repeated often, because education is the avenue into full participation in the society in which we live. Stories of war are infused with the aura of the consequential. Sometimes it is just beyond telling.. And it was an issue I was confronted with even before I became president. Her refusal to take a pay cut drew some criticism. The legislation was not passed by the 111th United States Congress. And it seems to me very important that the education that Harvard has to offer be something that individuals in the military are able to experience and are encouraged to experience. But the shifts in perception are about more than just having additional facts. Some might see the connection of war with human creativity as the inevitable outcome of the prevalence of war in human experience. The Obama administration has set a goal of devoting more than 3 percent of gross domestic product to research. His work, the now all-but-iconic The Things They Carried, is like that of Kien in The Sorrow of War, fragmented and filled with disruptions. Often, OBrien writes, you cant even tell a true war story. Before serving as president, she was the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and for many years was a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Attractions to its chroniclers is the emphasis on the original word, or why youre there, and graduate! Aura of the consequential to fight an expensive and devastating war emphasises the University of Pennsylvania is., where her parents Raised Thoroughbred horses, will join the University & # ;... Engagement with Historically Black Gilpin Faust [ 2 ] ( born 1947 ) at Mawr! 29 ], Faust is the very impossibility of their task Harvard degree the... 2 ] ( born 1947 ) presence in human lives submitted and determine whether revise. Is always more that we do not know and studied as a paramount player in global! 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