Sandra F. VanBurkleo is professor of history at Wayne State University, Detroit. She teaches and writes about relations between American law, gender, and race. Her latest book is Gender Remade: Citizenship, Suffrage, and Public Power in the New Northwest, 1879-1912 (2016); her new work is tentatively entitled “‘Words As Hard As Cannon-Balls’: Understandings of Freedom of Expression Before the American Civil War.”