Current Book Project: His Long Road Home: Robert Glenn’s Story of Slavery, Separation, and the Enduring Power of Memory

In 1937, the 87-year-old Robert Glenn opened his door to a government interviewer to speak about his life as an enslaved child. The result was a masterpiece of memory.  With stunning detail and precision, he recounted how, at age seven, he was sold three times on the same fateful day. Torn from his parents—certain he would never see them again—he always remembered his mother’s love and their last tearful meeting. After surviving a brutal guerrilla insurgency during the Civil War and fleeing the terror of the KKK, he joyously reunited with his family two decades later—ushering in, he said, “the happiest period of my life.”

Using the tools of the modern historical detective, I unearth this extraordinary story of love, remembrance, and resilience. At a time when powerful political forces try to minimize slavery and its legacies, Robert Glenn reminds us of the power of ordinary people to tell their truths and reclaim their history.

  • Nineteenth Century U.S. (especially the Civil War)
  • Slavery and Emancipation
  • Political Economy
  • Teaching History

His Long Road Home: Robert Glenn’s Story of Slavery, Separation, and the Enduring Power of Memory

  • Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation
    UNC Press, 2009
  • A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War
    New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  • “What do Players Learn from Videogames?  Historical Analysis and Sid Meier’s Civilization,” The Public Historian (February 2021), 62-81.

  • “Why Did Northerners Oppose the Extension of Slavery? Economic Development in the Limestone South,” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

  • “Toward a Social History of the Corporation: Shareholding in Pennsylvania, 1800-1840,” in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, edited by Cathy Matson (University of Pennsylvania, 2006).

  • Markets and Manufacturing: Industry and Agriculture in the Antebellum South and Midwest, Co-authored with Viken Tchakerian.
    in Susana Delfino and Michele Gillespie (eds.), Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (University of Missouri Press, 2005).
  • “Imagining ‘A Great Manufacturing Empire’: Virginia and the Possibilities of a Confederate Tariff, Co-authored with Jay Carlander.
    Civil War History 49 (December 2003): 334-352.
  • History 162B (U. S. Antislavery Movements)
  • History 162R (Research Seminar on U. S. Antislavery Movement)
  • History 9 (Primary Sources and Historical Methods Used to Understand Slavery)