Robert F. Engs
Professor of History
Robert F. Engs has been in the Penn History Department since 1972. His primary teaching areas at both the graduate and undergraduate levels are: African American History, US Civil War and Reconstruction, History of the US South. He also teaches in the undergraduate and M.A.L. Programs of the College of General Studies. He has directed the US History Honors Seminar three times and has taught the North American History Survey in the Lauder Institute of the Wharton School.
Professor Engs's research focuses on the postbellum era, specifically the responses of the freedpeople and white Southerners to emancipation. He has a special interest in the roles of education, religion, and of missionaries in the emancipation process. His first two books, Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Va., 1861-1890 and Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited; Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839-1893 reflect that focus. His most recent volume, edited with Randall Miller, The Rise of the Grand Old Party, treats the early years of the Republican Party. He has also developed an electronic archive on the middle 19th Century entitled, "The Crisis of the Union Archives".
Professor Engs has also written on slavery, the emancipation process during the Civil War, postbellum Southern politics and economics, the Gilded Age, on American missionary work at home and abroad, and on the civil rights era. He is presently editing a collection of Civil War letters from an Ohio family to be entitled, Our Patriotic Duty.
Professor Engs is a former Guggenheim and William Penn Fellow. He is a recipient of the Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has been Commonwealth Visiting Professor at the College of William and Mary. He directed the President's Forum, "The Enduring Significance of Race," at the University of Pennsylvania, and has served as undergraduate chair of the History Department and co-chair of the Afro-American Studies Program. He was co-developer of the exhibit and symposium sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia on "The Origins of the Republican Party" in 2000.
Beyond the university, Professor Engs regularly lectures at historically black colleges and for local community organizations. He also works with the public schools in their development of curriculum on African American history and social studies. He is currently working with the Center for Community Partnerships on a course to be taught in association with University City High School.
Courses Taught (As Schedule Allows)
For current course listings, consult the Course Directory.
- HIST 176 Introduction to African American History, 1550 - 1896
- HIST 204 Politics of Disunion, 1848 - 1876
- HIST 204 Reconstruction
- HIST 304 Teaching About Freedom and Emancipation in the Civil War Era, c. 1828 - 1870
- HIST 363 Civil War and Reconstruction
- HIST 485 Emancipation and its Aftermath: 1861 - 1900
- HIST 529 African American History to 1900
- HIST 610 U.S. Civil War & Reconstruction
- HIST 610 The Politics of Disunion: The Civil War Era and the Creation of the Third American Party System, 1830 - 1880
