Episode 62: GLORY with Hilary Green, Adam Domby, Chris Barr, and Holly Pinheiro

Historians At The Movies

This week we wanted to do something special. We talking about Edward Zwick's Civil War masterpiece, Glory, starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes, Morgan Freeman, and a host of other amazing performers. We talk about how the role of slavery in antebellum America, the specific experiences and dangers of the 54th Massachusetts, Glory compares to other films about the war, and why these conversations still matter today. This is easily the most important conversation we've had and I hope you like it.
About our guests:
Hilary Green is James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Her first book, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), explored how African Americans and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American education schools during the transition from slavery to freedom in Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama. Her in-progress second book focuses on how African Americans remembered and commemorated the American Civil War and its legacy.
Chris Barr is a Park Ranger at Reconstruction Era National Park in Becufort, South Carolina, where he has spent a career in the National Park Service teaching about the Civil War, Reconstruction and their legacies.
Holly Pinheiro is an Assistant Professor of African American History in the Department of History at Furman University. His research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1930s. Counter to the national narrative which championed the patriotic manhood of soldiering from the Civil War through the 1930s, his research reveals that African American veterans and their families’ military experience were much more fraught. Economic and social instability introduced by military service resonated for years and even generations after soldiers left the battlefield. He has published articles in edited volumes and academic journals, in and outside of the United States. My manuscript, The Families’ Civil War, is under contract with The University of Georgia Press in the UnCivil Wars Series. The study highlights how racism, within and outside of military service, impacted the bodies, economies, family structures, and social spaces of African Americans long after the war ended.
Adam Domby is a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction. His first book, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020), examines the role of lies and exaggeration, in the creation of Lost Cause narratives of the war, as well as their connections to white supremacy. Looking at pension fraud, Confederate monument dedications, and other myths reveals that much of our understanding of the Civil War remains influenced by falsehoods and racism. Domby has written on a variety of topics including prisoners of war, guerrilla warfare, and genealogy. His current book project At War with Itself, focuses on southerners fighting their neighbors during the American Civil War and examines the legacy of those local fights that civil wars inevitably create. His research centers on the role these conflicts played in three divided southern communities during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Close examination of the social dynamics of these southern communities reveals new insights into why the Confederacy lost, why Reconstruction ended the way it did, and the distinctiveness of southern society, culture, and politics.