Lorri Glover, Ph.D.
Professor
History
Courses Taught
Research in American History (graduate & undergraduate); Early American History in a Global Age (graduate); American Historiography (graduate); Approaches to Writing U.S. History (graduate); Family, Gender, and Politics in Early America (graduate); The American Revolution (undergraduate); Historians Craft (undergraduate); American History to 1865 (undergraduate); World History since 1500 (undergraduate)
Education
Ph.D. University of Kentucky, 1996
M.A. Clemson University, 1992
B.S. University of North Alabama, 1990
Research Interests
I’m fascinated by early America, especially the social history of the English colonies and the creation of the American Republic. Within the general field of early American history, I have ranged fairly broadly, publishing books on siblings and kinship in colonial South Carolina, masculinity in the Early Republic, the seventeenth-century colonization of Virginia and Bermuda, the intersection of family and politics in the lives of leading American Revolutionaries, and the contentious debates over ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787-1788.
My most recent book is a biography of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. Born in Antigua in 1722 and educated in England as a girl, Eliza Lucas moved with her family to South Carolina in the late 1730s. When her father was suddenly recalled to his military post in the Caribbean, Eliza, though only seventeen years old, took over managing three plantations. She also started conducting agricultural experiments, including indigo production. Indigo, cultivated by enslaved laborers and marketed globally, soon became a cornerstone of South Carolina's plantation economy. Eliza presided over a brutal slave regime on her Lowcountry estates, turning forced Black labor into profits and prestige for her family. Eliza also independently studied law and drafted wills for some of her neighbors. In her mid-twenties, Eliza Lucas (partly, briefly) took on a more conventionally female role. She married a wealthy and politically powerful widower, Charles Pinckney, and started a family. After Charles Pinckney died in 1758, Eliza never remarried. Instead, she managed their estate (crops, houses, investments, and enslaved people), including through the tumultuous years of the American Revolution, while raising three extraordinarily successful children. Eliza’s daughter, Harriott, shared her mother’s exceptional self-confidence and capability as an independent female planter, and her two sons, Thomas and Charles Cotesworth, became accomplished diplomats and nationally influential leaders. Eliza Lucas Pinckney's remarkable writings—the largest collection from any women in the eighteenth-century South—afford fascinating insight into agriculture and commerce in the Atlantic World, southern plantations and racial slavery, and gender history. I thoroughly enjoyed investigating her life, which carried me to Antigua and London as well as back to Charleston, South Carolina, where I began my dissertation research two decades ago.
Publications and Media Placements
Books
Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2020)
The Fate of the Revolution: Virginians Debate the Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)
Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (Yale University Press, 2014)
The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America, co-author with Daniel Blake Smith (Henry Holt, 2008)
Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)
All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds Among the Early South Carolina Gentry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
Edited Volumes
Reinterpreting Southern Histories, edited with Craig Thompson Friend (Louisiana State University Press, 2020)
Death and the American South, edited with Craig Thompson Friend (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, edited with Craig Thompson Friend (University of Georgia Press, 2004)
Textbooks
Discovering the American Past: A Look at the Evidence, co-author with William Bruce Wheeler (Cengage, 2017, 8th edition)
Discovering the American Past: A Look at the Evidence, co-author with William Bruce Wheeler (Cengage, 2012, 7th edition)
Articles and Book Chapters
“The Strange Career of C. Vann Woodward,” Journal of Southern History 89 (August 2023): 535-548
“Eliza Lucas Pinckney: Female Fortitude and the Revolutionary War,” in Holly Mayer, ed., Women Waging War in the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2022)
“The State of Southern Historiography,” with Craig Thompson Friend, in Reinterpreting Southern Histories (Louisiana State University Press, 2020)
“When ‘History becomes Fable instead of Fact’: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries,” in Death in the American South (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
“The Colonial South,” in Daniel Letwin, ed., The American South (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)
“Faith and the Founding of Virginia,” Historically Speaking, June 2010
“Making Southern Men: Education and Masculinity among the Early Republic Gentry,” in Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (University of Georgia Press, 2004)
“An Education in Southern Masculinity: The Ball Family of South Carolina in the New Republic,” Journal of Southern History 69 (2003): 39-71
“Between Two Cultures: The Worlds of Rosalie Stier Calvert,” Maryland Historical Magazine April 1996
Honors and Awards
- SLU Women’s Commission, Woman of the Year, 2022
- Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Biography Prize, 2021
- George Rogers Book Prize, South Carolina Historical Society, 2021
- Jules and Francis Landry Book Prize, LSU Press, 2020
- Donald G. Brennan Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring, 2020
- Outstanding Alumni Award, Educator of the Year, University of North Alabama, 2017
- Fred W. Smith Library Fellow, Mount Vernon, 2016
- President, Southern Association for Women Historians, 2015
- State Historical Society of Missouri Book Prize, 2015