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May 23, 2024 | 
bostonglobe.com | Drew Faust
What is a university? We have been taking its existence and its essence for granted, even as attacks on its character and purposes have over several decades steadily, if gradually, mounted. The polarizations of race, religion, and politics that grip our country today have focused increasingly on universities. They have become a symbol for those divisions as well as the theater in which they are being acted out.
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May 8, 2024 | 
theatlantic.com | Drew Faust
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.
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Nov 17, 2023 | 
newyorkfolk.com | James White |Drew Faust
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.
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Nov 13, 2023 | 
theatlantic.com | Drew Faust
Updated at 3:28 p.m. ET on January 8, 2024Harpers 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.
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Oct 20, 2023 | 
bookbrowse.com | Drew Faust
Media Reviews
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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.
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Sep 5, 2023 | 
theamericanscholar.org | Drew Faust
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.
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Aug 24, 2023 | 
lithub.com | Drew Faust
“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, 1967On 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.
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Aug 22, 2023 | 
politics-prose.com | Drew Faust
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.
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Aug 21, 2023 | 
washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | Drew Faust
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.
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Aug 17, 2023 | 
bostonglobe.com | Drew Faust
As a historian, I have spent much of my life listening to voices from the past. Now, in my new book, “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury,” I seek to be one of those voices, telling a story of an era that is known to fewer and fewer people alive today. Yet it was a world we need to remember and understand because its hopes and its struggles have so profoundly shaped the troubled moment in which we find ourselves. It is time for me not just to listen but to tell.
