From a New York Times book review by Jennifer Schuessler headlined “A Harvard President’s Reflections on a Southern Girlhood”:

As president of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018, Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman to occupy the highest bully pulpit of American higher education. But before that, she was a leading historian of the Civil War and the Old South, who combed through letters and diaries of people like her own ancestors, trying to understand, as she puts it, how people could believe — and defend — “abhorrent things.”