LEACH: There is in Lincolns background that dimension, and also the obverse dimension. And there was Harry Byrd, who was not just our senator, but really our neighbor. Truth cannot simply be claimed; it must be establishedeven when that process is uncomfortable. 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. The English Word. Wars participants have often noted the failure of words to convey either its reality or its meaning. Related Speeches. Western historiography was born somewhat later, but it too emerged as a chronicle of war in the hands of Herodotus and Thucydides in the fifth century BCE. You cant tell where you are, or why youre there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. A surprising expression of this point of view came in March, when, after a forty-year absence, ROTC was welcomed back onto campus. Fausts research into how the South viewed and justified slavery led her to other stories of the era, including those of Confederate women, generally thought of as being among the staunchest supporters of the Confederate cause. LEACH: And yet records, especially those people create for themselves, are especially important to your work, even though, as you have noted, a historian must keep in mind that when people write of their times and themselves they can be misled or misleading. I juxtapose Widener Library and Memorial Church today because we need the qualities that both represent, because I believe that reason and knowledge must be inflected with values, and that those of us who are privileged to be part of this community of learning bear consequent responsibilities. "Nightly Business Report" with Susie Gharib, wp.nbr.com. Only if we ourselves model a commitment to fact over what Stephen Colbert so memorably labeled as truthiness (and he also actually sometimes called it Veritasiness!), only then can we credibly call for adherence to such standards in public life and a wider world. Each of which has important messages to deliver to you and important things they want from you. Drew Gilpin Faust is President Emerita of Harvard University and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. At the same time, American colleges and universities have remained the envy of the world. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wounded three times in the Civil War, called his experience incommunicable. Soldiers on both sides of the conflict would have agreed. For a young woman historian of her native region, these subjects were hardly the comfort zones of Southern history. "[15] The new policy expanded on earlier programs that eliminated contributions for families earning less than $60,000 a year and greatly reduced costs for families earning less than $100,000. Drew Gilpin Faust graduated from Bryn Mawr College, got her graduate degrees at Penn and served on Penn's faculty for 25 years and for the last 11 years, she's led Harvard. The University also undertook an involuntary reduction in staff of 2.4 percent of its employees. At Penn there wasnt the same strong tradition of Southern history that had come into being at, for example, Yale and Johns Hopkins. Drew Faust has been a pioneer in at least three distinct subfields of nineteenth-century American history: first, the intellectual history of the Old South, especially proslavery ideology; second, the history of women and gender; and third, the social and cultural history of the Civil War, particularly that conflicts overwhelming scale of death and suffering. King was seizing the right to the kind of celebration of the Proclamation that Civil War centennial organizers had suppressed not quite a year before. Nor, American society has come to believe since 1962, can rights be denied because of gender. Ruth J. Simmons during a 2007 Harvard panel discussion among women Ivy League presidents (including then-president-designate Drew Gilpin Faust) Courtesy Harvard University T his morning, Harvard announced that Ruth Simmons, Ph.D. '73, LL.D. South, 1840-1860, Drew Gilpin Faust investigates the extraordinary association of five antebellum Southern intellectuals who cooperated "to establish a role for men of mind in their region. In This Republic Of Suffering, historian Drew Gilpin Faust reveals that the rate of death during the American Civil war was six times that of World War II a fact which created a shared. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania, where she joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1976. The publication of an average of more than a hundred books a year during each of these past five decades has meant an accumulation of information that would inevitably change understanding. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation of the schools. . The first masterwork of Western literature, dating to approximately 750 BCE, was the Iliad, a tale that exerts a wrenching power more than two millennia after its origin. But in the years since World War II, it was higher education, not just instruction at the elementary or high school levels, that emerged as necessary for a technologically skilled work force as well as fundamental to cherished values of opportunity. In the enthusiasm of students and faculty, we see it as well. What is happening to the world? An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. The public record similarly documented that history in politics, business, the military, and other influential spheres built around record-keeping institutions. and surviving, but with ultimately finding meaning in it all. 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. Why choose war? It is terrible and yet we love it; we need to witness the worst of its destruction in order not to love it even more. 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. Faust's book is an illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. As chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and professor at Texas Tech University, Hayhoe has always understood the global climate crisis through the lens of her faith and her belief in our responsibility to care for others. Source: Library of Congress. There wasnt a vivid discourse of race. But it is more than the magnitude, the weightiness of war that makes it the best subject for our stories and that has lodged it at the heart of the humanities since the time of Homer. There were a lot of very powerful, influential historians who were studying the South, and that was intriguing. But the shifts in perception are about more than just having additional facts. War assumes a trajectory towards victory and thus the possibility of its own cessation and conclusion. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war and have remained entwined with it ever since. Faust is the fifth woman to serve as president of an Ivy League university. It is as if we are being visited by the horsemen of the apocalypse with war, famine, natural disasterand, yes, even pestilenceas Zika spreads, aided by political controversy and paralysis. Harvard President Drew Faust urged the Harvard medical community to take the long view of Harvard's future in moving ahead. Her father was a Princeton graduate and breeder of thoroughbred horses. LEACH: Let me ask you about James Henry Hammond, about whom you wrote a biography. Two months from now, we will again witness a reenactment of the Battle of Bull Run. The white minority felt the need to exert control over the enslaved population. And we realized that all of us had parents who served in World War II. The economic downturn has had what is perhaps an even more worrisome impact. Her father bred thoroughbred horses on their sprawling land and her mother brought her up to be a lady. But along with her three brothers, Drew preferred to get a great education, and to challenge the gender destiny and racial segregation with which she came of age. A documentary based on the book aired on PBS in 2012. . Despite the creation of the task-force committees, whose goals were to hire and promote more women in the sciences, Summers was forced to resign in early 2006, effective June 30 of that year. I also am very conscious of what General David Petraeus articulated here in a commissioning ceremony for the ROTC cadets a couple of years ago, which is that a soldiers most important weapon is ideas. Responding to terrorism with war replaced the specter and fear of mass murder with a hope for the controlled, ordered force of war. overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= Shelby Foote used the word crossroads to describe the Civil War. As late as the 1920s, enrollments in the United States stood below 5 percent of the college-age population. [5], Drew Gilpin was born in New York City[6] and raised in Clarke County, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. James Suiter of the 84th Illinois reported in his diary that a depiction of Chickamauga would be an absolute impossibility. John Casler of the Stonewall Brigade struggled for words in a letter to his parents, I have not power to describe the scene. Even the battlefield looks different. Keegan insisted on allowing the combatants to speak for themselves. The Civil War has proved a rich context in which to pursue such a strategy, for the broad literacy of the American population generated tens, likely hundreds, of thousands of soldiers letters sent home from battlefields from Bull Run to Petersburg and carefully cherished and preserved by their recipients. In myriad ways we challenge our students to be individuals of character as well as of learning. which else had remained torpid in our souls. Historian Francis Parkman of Boston believed that war would renew and purify the nation, liberating it from its growing preoccupation with material success. The Richmond Enquirer saw in war an offer of the joys of patriotism and brotherhood, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the demise of selfishness and the ecstasy of martyrdom. Greetings alumni, graduates, families, and friends. And, interestingly, in the last year its crept back into the American political vocabulary. And it seemed to me that one way of responding, a way that added a perspective from the new kind of history that was being done of actors who hadnt been included before, was to suggest that indeed their agency included having an impact on this most fundamental of Civil War questions. At this time there was a belief that slaves had no sense of family because it had been destroyed by the oppressions of slavery. One bag of trash was created. Drew Gilpin Faust, U.S. historian and former Harvard president, delivered Tuesday's forum address. Gilpin grew up in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, where her parents raised Thoroughbred horses. In the seventies, the womens movement made military service a big focus of the struggle for womens equality. I would not have missed it for worlds.. As we come over time to see ourselves differently, we will ask different questions of our past, and as we ask those questions, we in turn develop changed perceptions of ourselves. LEACH: At Harvard, under your leadership, ROTC has been welcomed back to campus after a forty-year hiatus. A specialist in the history of the South in the antebellum period and Civil War, Faust rose to become Walter Annenberg Professor of History. by Drew Gilpin Faust nn the first battle of the Civil War, the only casualty was a horse. FAUST: That was the other part of history that I lived in: The stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement were emerging all around me when I was a young child. That army was not simply destroyed through death and disease, but also through all those men who seemed to disappear back into the hillsides. After attending Bryn Mawr College -- a seven sister school and one of the few remaining women's colleges in the country -- she earned a Ph.D. in American Civilization and became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Drew Gilpin Faust President, Harvard "Women in Leadership: Drew Gilpin Faust". She has also written books about the effects of the war on Southern womanhood and about the lives and culture of slaverys apologists in the antebellum South. Will this reenactment do any more to acknowledge the wars purposes and politics and their continuing significance than did the reenactments of fifty years ago? Education. As we continue to be lured by war, we must be committed to convey its horrors. Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust, who shepherded the school through the turbulence of the economic recession and expanded its diversity, will step down in June 2018 after 11. We all share a common history in America, but we dont necessarily share a common perspective. Mothers of Invention is a gender study by Drew Gilpin Faust that concerns Southern white women during the Civil War. When the smoke lifted after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, southerners hailed the "bloodless victory" that had yielded the federal fort into Confederate hands without the loss of a single human life. He struggles to find another subject but relentlessly his pen disobeyed him; he cannot stop writing war stories. Ultimately, however, his words and stories fail, for he can find no narrative. Facing Widener stands Memorial Church. Drew Faust Director Since: July 2018 Goldman Sachs Committees: Compensation, Governance, Public Responsibilities Other Current U.S.-Listed Public Company Directorships: None Other U.S.-Listed Public Company Directorships within past 5 years: Staples, Inc. Key Experience and Qualifications And he was always Lee, so I had to be Grant. Robert Penn Warren wrote of the war as that mystic cloud from which emerged our modernity, the great single event of our history. Historian and novelist Shelby Foote has called it the crossroads of our being. John Hope Franklin believed that it provided a common experience of suffering and sacrifice without which real nationhood and pursuit of a common destiny would have remained impossible. [B]ut Peace is poor reading. Wars decide; they change rulers, governments, societies and the human beings swept up in them. . Another would be the importance of the United States and Lincolns arguments for the United States. But that seeming incongruity simply reinforces the centrality of paradox to any understanding of war. How did you become interested in writing a whole book on the wars death toll and its social consequences? [2] 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. are 74 percent higher than for workers who possess only a high school diploma. We expect wars to come with endings; that is part of their story. Most other creatures engage in violence, and some insects and animals with elaborate social structures reflect those systems in their modes of fighting and aggression. FAUST: I loved writing that biography of Hammond because he wrote down everything he did. The University's Crisis of Purpose. On January 9, 2008, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust spoke on her newest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. During the punishing years of the Civil War, Faust chronicled how women of the South went from self-denying to self-preserving, with their allegiances shifting from the aims of Confederate army to the safety of their families. But one has the sense you continued thinking about your Southern heritage through your chosen field of study. Our war stories bear a critical responsibility for shaping these expectations from one generation to the next. . LEACH: With our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan today, we seem to be learning again that sometimes its harder to end a war than to start one. Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. Its fascination lies in its ability at once to allure and repel, in the paradox that thrives at its heart. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. Unlike perhaps any other institutions in the world, they embrace the long view and nurture the kind of critical perspectives that look far beyond the present. Because we still believe that as a nation we have been defined by the ideals and the sacrifice of that war, we feel compelled even a hundred fifty years later to situate ourselves in relationship to it. In the months preceding the layoffs, various campus groups called upon Faust and other administrators to reduce their salaries as a means of cutting costs campus-wide. We will continue to be educated in one way or another until our very last breath., Next Devotional: Ryan Gabriel, Assistant Professor of Sociology. In some respects, this is not new. At the outbreak of the Crimean War, for example, Tennyson enthusiastically anticipated the sudden making of splendid names and the heart of a people that would beat with one desire. Herbert Asquiths World War I poem The Volunteer depicted a clerk who half his life had spent/ Toiling at ledgers in a city grey, who was now invited to join the men of Agincourt. The American Civil War, fought in the years between Balaclava and the Western Front, generated similar sentiments and declarations. FAUST: I felt very much that I lived in historyin a couple of different ways. Harvard President Drew Faust (2011) Quotes [ edit] The school adopted a motto that has a double meaning: Learn to change the world., The phrase is at once an invitation come and learn how to change the world and a statement of fact education changes the world, she said. The army and the military services were integrated into American life in a way they no longer are. We love war because of these stories. Drew Gilpin Faust: Thank you, Percy. 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