The author, professor and past president of Harvard University discusses her memoir "Necessary Trouble" with Shirley Tilghman, professor and past president of Princeton University.
This event is free, but ticketed. To reserve tickets, click here. Kindly return reserved tickets on Eventbrite if you are unable to attend.
About the Book: 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: Growing Up at Midcentury" 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.
Drew Gilpin Faust is university professor of history at Harvard University. She was dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007 and 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."
Shirley Tilghman served as president of Princeton University from 2001 to 2013 and is professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Co-presented by Labyrinth Books and the library and co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Humanities Council, Gender and Sexuality Studies, History, and African American Studies departments, and by SPIA in NJ.
