Drew Gilpin Faust to Speak and Sign Her New Book

Drew Gilpin Faust to Speak and Sign Her New Book

at Long Branch Historic Home and Gardens

Thursday, September 7 at 3 p.m.

Drew Gilpin Faust has devoted her life’s work to listening to the voices of the past. With “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury,” the time has come for her not just to listen, but to tell.

The acclaimed historian of the Civil War and the American South, Faust is the daughter of noted horse owner, the late M. Tyson Gilpin and Catharine Ginna Mellick, who lived near Millwood not far from Long Branch. Writing with great insight and candor, she illuminates an era of cataclysmic change through the choices, challenges, and dawning convictions. The book covers her childhood in segregated Virginia to her teenage years of outspoken activism to her first vote cast for a different future at age 21.

Drew Gilpin Faust knew she had been born into history. Nearly a century after Appomattox, the legacy of the antebellum South was alive in the 1950s, and, as a privileged white girl in a conservative community, she was expected to accept it without question.

But from an early age, Faust also sensed that she was born into a time of upheaval, when deep-rooted assumptions and inequities, gender as well as racial, met with challenges that shook the status quo of even rural Clarke County, Virginia.

And perhaps most of all, Faust recognized she was born into circumstances that made resistance not just a choice, but an imperative. Whether waging a perennial war with her mother over the double standard for men and women, or petitioning President Eisenhower to end school segregation when she was nine years old, the young Faust made trouble in order to survive.

Faust wasn’t the only member of her generation seeking “a way to live otherwise,” and as she entered adolescence, the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements came to full force. For Faust, that meant marching from Selma to Montgomery in the wake of Bloody Sunday, eliminating gendered curfews at Bryn Mawr, and, in the summers of 1963 and 1964, joining an integrated group of fellow teenagers on journeys through the Soviet Union and the southern United States.

All of this also meant grappling with the question of freedom and the responsibilities it might entail, with such disparate influences as Scout Finch, Albert Camus, and Chuck Berry as guides.

“Necessary Trouble” captures how the demands of this pivotal moment – to penetrate the blindness of the present, uncover the real meaning of the past, and imagine a better future – became, for Faust, the project of a lifetime. Now, with her historian’s ear tuned to the deeply personal, she offers an indelible portrait of a young woman and a nation on the cusp of change.

Faust was the 28th president of Harvard University from July 1, 2007, until July 1, 2018. She was the first woman, the first southerner, and the first non-Harvard graduate to occupy that position. Her previous books include “This Republic of Suffering,” winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and “Mothers of Invention.” Details: www.visitlongbranch. org, tickets are $25, 540-837-1856.