One day, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust missed a call from Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley. “He said he had good news,” Faust recalled. “I said I could use some good news.” So she e-mailed Brinkley, asking him to call her. Brinkley telephoned Faust late that night to inform her that she had won a Bancroft Prize for her latest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, published in 2008.
