Short answers, pulled from the story.
Kevin Jarre wrote the screenplay for Glory while staring at the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common in Room 421 of the Gramercy Park Hotel during a few weeks in 1988. He drew inspiration from Peter Burchard's One Gallant Rush published in 1965 and Lincoln Kirstein's Lay This Laurel released in 1973.
Glory premiered in limited release on the 15th of December 1989 and expanded to wide release on the 16th of February 1990. The production team filmed sequences depicting the Battle of Grimball's Landing at Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park between late 1989 and early 1990.
The climactic assault on Fort Wagner took place on the beaches of Jekyll Island in Georgia. Scenes meant to show the Battle of Antietam featured volunteer reenactors at Gettysburg Battlefield while other sequences were shot at Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park.
None of the soldiers portrayed except Shaw were real people though two sons of Frederick Douglass served in the unit. The movie depicts a soldier receiving a flogging yet such punishment was not permitted within the Union army and no record exists of any Black soldier being whipped during their service.
In 2025 the Library of Congress selected Glory for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. This decision recognized the work as culturally historically or aesthetically significant to American heritage.