This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest drew Gilpin Faust as best known as the first woman to be president of Harvard, a position she held from 2007 to 2018, and for her books about the Civil War.

Having just read her new memoir, I understand why the Civil War is her subject and academia her home. She grew up in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in the 50s and 60s, where she was groomed to be a proper southern lady,

and she resisted every step of the way. Her grandmother acted like the Civil War was just yesterday, and she was commemorating the South the way it used to be.

In preparing Faust to be a lady, her mother insisted that Faust were a skirt to dinner. Faust knew she needed to escape these norms, and her way out was boarding school in New England, and after that it was on to Bryn Mark College in the suburb of Philadelphia.

Most of the Ivy League schools didn't even admit women at that time. She became a student activist and a civil rights and anti-war activist during the war in Vietnam.

Her memoir is called Necessary Trouble, growing up at mid-century. Necessary Trouble is a quote from John Lewis, who she knew, and who approved of her using his expression as the title of her book.

In the prologue she writes that her formative years were at a time when, quote,

It was a time that inaugurated many of the changes and divisions we grapple with still. The strangeness of that world can perhaps encourage us that at least some things have changed for the better in the course of my life.

And at a time when we see many of those advances challenged or even overturned, it can remind us why we don't want to live in such a world again, unquote.

Faust is a research professor of history at Harvard. In 2018, she won the $1 million John W. Kluge prize for achievement in the study of humanity, administered by the Library of Congress.

The prize recognizes work not covered by the no bells. Drew Gilman Faust, welcome to Fresh Air, welcome back.

So like I said in the intro, I can understand why you became a historian of the Civil War. You were in some way still living through it because of your grandmother and because of where you lived.

Would you describe your grandmother's feelings of connection to the Confederacy?

Well, thank you very much for having me back. It's great to be with you, Terry.

My grandmother was born in the 1890s in Knoxville, Tennessee. And that was a time when there were a lot of people alive who'd experienced the Civil War and remembered it.

And I think she was imbued with many of those attitudes. She spoke of Sherman as a very unattractive man as if he were someone she'd met on the street.

And so her views about the Civil War were very much a product of her time and place. And they also included a set of views about race, which were kind of romanticizations of race relations in the South, a kind of gone with the wind rendition of faithful servants and benevolent masters.

A portrait of slavery that's completely at odds with what we know it to have been an exploitive and cruel system in which blacks and whites were set apart and offered very different expectations and circumstances in their lives.

A plaque that she commissioned for the historic cemetery kind of exemplifies what you're saying. It read to the glory of God and in remembrance of the many personal servants buried there, faithful and devoted in life, their friends and masters laid them near them in death with affection and gratitude.

Their memory remains though their wooden markers like the way of life of that day are gone forever. What do you find most troubling and most baffling about the wording of that plaque? I mean, servants? There were slaves.

Yes, they were slaves, but servants was the kind of euphemism that was so often applied in these romanticizations of the old South.

But there's one phrase in particular that's so striking, just three words, friends and masters. Isn't that a contradiction in and of itself that this was domination? This was not the equality that is the foundation of friendship.

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