‘Necessary Trouble’ by Drew Gilpin Faust
Faust and I grew up in the South about the same time when Jim Crow was king and most people saw the Civil War as a glorious and noble lost cause. I’m interested in her take on the world we knew and the trouble people are having talking about that world openly and fairly today.
In an August 22 interview with NPR, she says, “I believe that affirmative action has changed the shape of and the landscape of higher education in a way that we need to continue,” she says. “The past is with us. We can’t pretend that it’s not, even as we misrepresent it or try to erase it.” When asked about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ black history teaching standards, she says, “It’s preposterous and it’s extremely distressing. It’s a complete distortion of the past, which is undertaken in service of the present, of minimizing racial issues in the present by saying everything’s been ‘just great’ for four centuries. Slavery was not ‘just great.’ It was oppressive. It was cruel. It involved exploitation of every sort, physical violence, sexual exploitation. ”
This interview gives you an idea about what to expect in Faust’s new book Necessary Trouble released by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux on August 22.
From the Publisher“A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.
“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.
“A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted” and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Drew forged a path of her own―one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in.
“Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman’s life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today.”
About the Author
Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. She was Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, and after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, she served as Harvard’s president from 2007 to 2018. Faust is the author of several books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
–Malcolm
