President of Harvard to Speak at Yale

For Immediate Release

Contact: Marilyn Wilkes (203) 432-3413

marilyn.wilkes@yale.edu

President of Harvard to Speak at Yale

October 13, 2008. New Haven, CT � Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, longtime scholar of the American South, and author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008), will talk about her book at 4:30 p.m. on October 29, at Luce Hall auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Ave.

Hosted by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the event is free and open to the public.

In a conversation with Gilder Lehrman Center director David W. Blight, Faust will examine the lives that were irrevocably changed by the Civil War and the mental and physical suffering of a nation. Faust’s study delves into the American struggle to understand the significance and realities of death in the face of the “unparalleled bloodshed” of the Civil War.

Faust’s work has received high praise, including that of eminent historian James M. McPherson, who commented, “No other generation of Americans has encountered death on the scale of the Civil War generation. This Republic of Suffering is the first study of how people in both North and South coped with this uniquely devastating experience. How did they mourn the dead, honor their sacrifice, commemorate their memory, and help their families? Drew Gilpin Faust’s powerful and moving answers to these questions provide an important new dimension to our understanding of the Civil War.”

Contact Information:

Marilyn Wilkes

The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale

(203) 432-3413