Necessary Trouble

Growing Up at Midcentury

De: Drew Gilpin Faust

Narrado por: Drew Gilpin Faust

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.

To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin Faust, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial privilege 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 the necessary price of survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Faust 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 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.

©2023 Drew Gilpin Faust (P)2023 Dreamscape Media

Reseñas de la Crítica

"This memoir by the distinguished historian and past president of Harvard is ably narrated by the author.... Listeners learn about her unhappy but privileged childhood in Virginia, which prompted her decision to dedicate her life to social justice." (AudioFile)

Tremendous and valuable, historical perspective!

Drew Faust was a kind observer and participant in probably the most important social upheaval in our nation’s history. She is a keen observer and excellent reporter on the 1960’s racial history to which I was more of an observer than a participant.

As a highly introspective young woman of the South with a growing awareness of the inequities of black-white racial societal norms, I give her enormous credit for her lifelong determination to help right those wrongs.

A moving memoir that is also an amazing lesson in the fraught American history of the 1960s

Dr Faust does an incredible job of recounting her truly remarkable youth while weaving the historical relevance right into her story. As a historian of the American South, she is uniquely qualified to explore her own history in the context of the time. I learned so much not only about her own remarkable childhood, youth, and early adulthood but also about the experience of living in the segregated South of the mid-twentieth century as a brilliant, privileged, justice-minded white girl from an upperclass family. It would make an excellent addition to a high school American history course, providing students with the perspective of a young person living through the Civil Rights Era.

Challenging

Thoughtful, informative and challenging. I have a much better understanding of the era I grew up on with the author. More than anything it reminds me of the accountability I have for what I see, hear and experience-- and that what I do about it can make a difference.

So much truth in history lived and retold.

My thanks to the author, for the history retold in the truth of the life that she has lived.

struggles and triumphs of mid century women

having grown up about 10 years after the author, so much of her story mirrors what my life was like still, despite the strides made by these courageous people. I felt a sisterhood with the author at every chapter and heard my voice in hers as she narrated her history - herstory.