This nation is awash with heated and ungenerous judgments about its past and about Americans who lived before we ascended to today’s sunny uplands of enlightenment. So, for your final summer read, try something tonally different: Drew Gilpin Faust’s memoir “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury.”

It concerns not her presidency of Harvard from 2007 to 2018 but her coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. She was a high-octane student activist, involved in dangerous civil rights campaigning in the Deep South before becoming hyper-active in agitating against U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

She is, however, an accomplished historian, and her book is most interesting, and needed, as a mellow, humane acceptance of an enduring truth from a forgotten novel (by L.P. Hartley): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Faust has gone back to a foreign country — America when post-1945 conventions and complacencies began to crumble — and has returned with a needed gift for today’s nation: an example of mature assessment.

Faust was born into a prosperous family in the caste system of segregated Virginia, a society thick with “rules and roles” governing — actually, suffocating — young White women and all Black people. They were entrapped, in not altogether dissimilar ways, in the viscosity of a society defined by strict racial and gender expectations that were unarticulated because they were unquestioned. Six decades ago, two braided emancipations began, the emancipation of women, and of Blacks nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Faust’s family rode to hounds and sent children north to tony prep schools and universities. But from an early age, Faust was intelligent, opinionated, curious, a voracious reader — and disconcerting to her determinedly conventional mother. A high school counselor would write of “Mrs. Gilpin’s bewilderment in connection with Drewdie’s intellectual gifts.” Drew’s mother “is like a hen that has hatched a duckling and cannot understand having a daughter who is not going to be a ‘southern belle.’”

Faust would not be “well-adjusted.” Least of all adjusted to a society in which the chivalric protection of women was, Faust writes, “inextricably tied to concessions of frailty and incapacity.” Young Drew was immersed “in a man’s world and a white world.” She sensed the connection and set about causing what John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman, called “necessary trouble.”

In the decade when Black author Ralph Ellison published his great novel “Invisible Man” (1952), Life magazine reflected national perceptions and assumptions. “With the exception of a butler serving a drink on a silver tray,” everyone pictured in Life’s 1950s advertisements was White, and working women — other than in Hollywood — also were mostly invisible.

The 36 volumes published before 1960 about an independent and resourceful 16-year-old, Nancy Drew, were formative also for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi, Sandra Day O’Connor and others. Faust “had never, at least as far as I knew, met a Jewish person” when she met, through a diary, an adolescent who was “an avid reader and aspiring writer,” Anne Frank. Scout, the 8-year-old daughter of Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” exemplified for Faust children “seeing clearly.”

Faust writes, “These girls who dared — Nancy, Anne, Scout — were daring me.” So, she went to Mississippi in 1964 for Freedom Summer, to Selma and Birmingham in 1965, this daughter whose father’s car once had a hood ornament of Robert E. Lee.

Faust is uncharacteristically intemperate when she denigrates Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic 1968 presidential nominee, as a “toady” because he did not “speak out” against the war. Faust was 10 months old when Humphrey, the 37-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, successfully provoked the Democrats’ 1948 national convention to put a civil rights plank in the party’s platform. By challenging the upholders of Jim Crow — Southern Democratic governors and legislators — Humphrey ignited necessary trouble, which Faust would later join.

Faust usually judges the past without rancor, contempt or preening, giving empathetic depictions of social contexts inherited by the people who inhabited them. When, generations hence, historians judge how we inhabited our context, they will be depicting the foreign country to which we then will be confined: the past.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.