In Jefferson Lecture, Drew Faust Traces the Fascination of War, From Homer to Bin Laden

War is hell—and it's a helluva story. Throughout history, from Homer's time on through the Civil War and into the present-day war on terror, we've been powerfully drawn by war narratives.

Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University and a prominent historian of the Civil War, made that bloody fascination the subject of her 2011 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, delivered here Monday night at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Jefferson Lecture is the federal government's most prestigious award for intellectual accomplishment in the humanities.

Ms. Faust has had a distinguished career as a historian of the Civil War and the antebellum South. Her most recent book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), won the 2009 Bancroft Prize. Her five other books include Mothers of Invention, an examination of the lives of the South's slaveholding women during the war....