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Drew Gilpin Faust: Harvard Leader Drew Faust Breaks New Ground Studying the Past

There are a number of things that make Drew Gilpin Faust different from those who've come before her as head honcho of America's flagship university.

Faust is, for example, the only president of Harvard known to have produced an academic paper titled "Equine Relics of the Civil War," the research for which included attending a solemn burial ceremony for the cremated bones of Stonewall Jackson's horse.

She is, it seems almost certain, the only one among the anointed to talk about what inspires her by calling herself "an archive rat."

More seriously: None of Faust's predecessors ever stood up at a conference of her fellow historians and suggested -- as Faust did in Washington in 2004 -- that the war narratives they so lovingly create may endow chaotic slaughter with a coherence and purposefulness it does not deserve. Now she has backed up that suggestion by publishing a Civil War book that focuses on a deceptively simple question: How did bloody carnage on a scale unprecedented in this country change the society that had to cope with it?

"This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War" is the culmination of a scholarly career that Faust's historian peers laud as unusually productive and original. If you're looking for what separates her from the Harvard pack, that career is an essential starting point....

[This article extends over 5 web pages.]
Read entire article at WaPo