Note: This article is an appreciation of Drew Faust on the occasion of her Jefferson Lecture tonight. “A Historian’s Historian” by David W. Blight was first published in the May-June 2011 issue of Humanities magazine, which is published by the National Endowment for the Humanities and can be found at http://www.neh.gov/.

“War is terrible and yet we love it,” wrote Drew Gilpin Faust in 2004. “War is, by its very definition, a story. War imposes an orderly narrative on what without its definition of purpose and structure would be simply violence. We as writers create that story; we remember that story….We love war because of these stories. But we should ask ourselves how in the construction of war stories we may be helping to construct war itself.” With such probing insights, Faust has made a permanent impact on the writing of American history.

Faust is widely known today as an important American first—the first woman president of Harvard University. For this distinction, her remarkable career should be recognized and studied as a story of ambitious and graceful achievement. Since her appointment as Harvard’s twenty-eighth leader in its 375-year history, she has established a reputation as a skilled manager of people. Universities, and especially the humanities, are vital to the very survival of our civilization. President Faust represents that essential truth as a model, but the trajectory by which she became Professor Faust tells us even more about her as a person and a scholar.

Catherine Drew ,Gilpin was born into a prosperous Virginia family on September 18, 1947, and raised in Clarke County in the northern reaches of the Shenandoah Valley. 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. She came north for high school to Concord Academy, a girls’ prep school in Massachusetts, and then to Bryn Mawr, a women’s college outside Philadelphia, where she graduated in 1968. 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....