I think the expectation of me was that I’d grow up, get married, have a family, probably not even have a job outside the home. I had bold notions sometime in my childhood that I...

For all its ubiquity and its universality, war offers the attraction of the extraordinary – the escape from the gray everyday, from the humdrum into higher things.

The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new – and sometimes unexpected – directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations. A liberal arts education is designed to equip students for just...

One of the major jobs of the Harvard president is to choose the deans. I’ve had the opportunity to choose a considerable number of deans already, so I’ve learned a lot in the process in...

Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face – to worry about how to die – distinguishes us from other animals. The need...

I think that issues of gender have been discussed widely at Harvard. But I think I was chosen clearly on the merits, and I wish to operate as president on the merits. I think, on...

The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.

When I address admitted students each spring, I ask them to consider two questions: Why would Harvard be the right place for the person I am? Why would it be the right place for the...

Death created the modern American union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments. The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.

I think the most important leadership lessons I’ve learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all...

High school students ought to seek out campus communities where they feel not only empowered to engage their talents, but also challenged to leave their comfort zones. The ability to embrace new opportunities emerges, in...

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that...

I’d say Harvard graduates leave here with a sense of the possible and the limit – and a sense that there are no limits to what humans can do and that you can always be...

Before the Civil War, there were no national cemeteries, no processes for identifying the dead in the battle. There weren’t any dog tags, and there was no next-of-kin notification. You didn’t necessarily even hear what...

The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the...

I’ve always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor – I never would have imagined that. Writing books – I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. – I’m not...

I lived in a world where social arrangements were taken for granted and assumed to be timeless. A child’s obligation was to learn these usages, not to question them. The complexities of racial deportment were...

I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle – for travel and...

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation’s history.

As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject...

We are in an international marketplace for talent, and American colleges and universities need to be able to attract students and faculty from around the world if we want to sustain our excellence.

When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at...

I have always loved animals, and as a child, I read a lot of horse books. I had a particular favorite called ‘Silver Snaffles’ that my mother gave away.

We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be...

Probably half the cases of Civil War dead were not identified. And so there was no way to let loved ones know, and there were no regularized processes in either Northern or Southern Army for...

Mortality defines the human condition.

Albert Camus’s ‘La Peste’ – ‘The Plague’ – had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I...

I always seem to be reading several books at once.

Americans in the Civil War period were very interested in Heaven and what it might be like, because they were having to face the fact that many of their loved ones were gone and many...

As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of ‘Lost Cause’ emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with...

I’ve had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died.

I never planned my career. I never planned to be president of Harvard. People would have thought I was crazy, probably, at the age of 8 or 10 or 20, if I had said that....

As a scholar, you don’t want to repeat yourself, ever. You’re supposed to say it once, publish it, and then it’s published, and you don’t say it again. If someone comes and gives a scholarly...

I think that the firepower of the Civil War, the numbers of bodies that were left to rot, the numbers of amputations in the Civil War, all of this created threats to the understanding of...