Dr. Robert Colby is the Associate Director of the Center for Civil War Research and an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi.
Research Interests
Dr. Robert Colby's research explores the Civil War era, with a focus on slavery, emancipation, and the lived experience of the conflict. His first book, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (published by Oxford University Press in 2024) explores the survival of the domestic slave trade during the Civil War, using wartime slave commerce to examine the endurance of Confederate nationalism, economic and social life during the war, and the contested onset of African-American freedom. He has published in the Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of the Early Republic, and Slavery and Abolition, as well as in edited volumes on reconciliation following Civil Wars and emotions and business history. He is currently at work on a microhistory of enslavement, war, and Reconstruction.
Biography
A Virginia native, Robert Colby earned his BA from the University of Virginia and his MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His book, An Unholy Traffic received the John L. Nau Book Prize from the Nau Center for Civil War History at UVA, as well as the Nonfiction Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. It was also a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Institute's Lincoln Prize, awarded annually to the best book in Civil War history. His work has previously won the Society of American Historians' Allan Nevins Prize and the Society of Civil War Historians' Anne J. Bailey Prize and Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award, and was a finalist for the Southern Historical Association's C. Vann Woodward Award. Before joining the University of Mississippi's History Department in 2022, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University.
Publications
Slave Trading in the Civil War South
From the publisher:
As An Unholy Traffic shows, slave trading helped Southerners survive and fight the Civil War, as well as to build the future for which they fought. They mitigated the crises the war spawned by buying and selling enslaved people, using this commerce to navigate food shortages, unsettled gender roles, the demands of military service, and other hardships on the homefront. Some Rebels speculated wildly in human property, investing in slaves to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding nation they hoped to create. Others traded people to counter the advance of emancipation. Given its centrality to their nationhood, Confederates went to great lengths to prolong the slave trade, which, in turn, supported the Confederacy. For those held in slavery, the surviving slave trade dramatically shaped their pursuit of freedom, inserting a retrograde movement into some people's journeys toward liberty while inspiring others to make the risky decision to escape.
Selected Article(s):
“‘Negroes Will Bear Fabulous Prices’: The Economics of Wartime Slave Commerce and Visions of the Confederate Future,” Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Dec. 2020), 439-468.
“‘Observant of the Laws of this Commonwealth”: A Free Black Family Between Forced Migration and Slave Capitalism,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Sept. 2022).
“What ‘The Books…Would Tell’: Slavery, Freedom, and History in Slave Traders’ Archives.” Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 43, No. 3, (Sept. 2022).
“Lee Returns to the Capitol: A Case Study in Reconciliation and Its Limits,” in Paul Quigley and James Hawdon, eds., Reconciliation After Civil Wars: Global Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).
Courses Taught
- HIST 1300 Intro to US History to 1877
- HIST 4040 US History: The Civil War Era, 1848-1877
- HIST 4220 The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
- HIST 4400 The Military History of the Civil War
- HIST 4900 Problems in History - America
- HIST 6050 Readings in US Through Reconstruction
- HIST 6110 Readings in Era of the US Civil War
Education
M.A. History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2015)
Ph.D. History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2019)
B.A. History, University of Virginia (2009)
Recognitions
- John Nau Book Prize, University of Virginia, 2025
- Nonfiction Award, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, 2025
- Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2025