Laura F Edwards
Biographic Data
| ID | 3742779 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura F Edwards |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura F |
| FAMILY NAME | Edwards |
| SIGNATURE | EDWARDS L F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0009-0005-8721-5286 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Historians and the Courts
This Q&A explores the benefits of and challenges to translating historical scholarship for a legal audience. MAH editorial board member Sarah A. Seo (NYU Law School) asked historian-experts Laura Edwards (Princeton University), Jennifer Mittelstadt (Rutgers University–New Brunswick), collaborators Samuel Erman (University of Michigan Law School) and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (University of Southern California), as well as Maggie Blackhawk (NYU Law Sc…
Trunks, Legal Texts, and the Materiality of Law in the Nineteenth Century
To say that everyone had a trunk in the nineteenth century is an overstatement, but only just. Even the enslaved and married women had trunks. Within those trunks were things that their owners called their property, which may seem odd, given that many of the trunks’ possessors did not have the rights considered necessary to own anything at all. As this article shows, trunks enabled legal claims to property and connections to place. Those principl…
Women’s Property and the Downward Spiral into Fraud: Questioning the Persistent Narrative of Progress in Women’s Legal Status
This article challenges the narratives that we tell ourselves about women’s history in the nineteenth century, particularly narratives that celebrate progress in the legal status of women, based on the acquisition of rights. As it shows, legal changes in the nineteenth century lumped all women into an artificially reductive category “women,” separated them from their families’ property, and turned those claims into something so problematic that t…
Response to Rebecca Scott's “Discerning a Dignitary Offense”
I applaud Scott's contributions. In this comment, I would like to take them up and push them further. Doing so points to a very different understanding of people's relationship to law and the legal system in the nineteenth century than is now current in much of the historiography. That perspective, I argue, can transform our understanding of the law and legal change in the Civil War era and in the nineteenth century more broadly
James and His Striped Velvet Pantaloons: Textiles, Commerce, and the Law in the New Republic
Law as Social History
This chapter explores two related themes embedded within the relationship between legal history and social history, focusing on the nineteenth century to highlight conceptual points that also apply more generally to other periods. First, it argues the field of legal history takes a broader understanding of the law than other historical fields. Moving beyond the written records, legal officials, and designated institutions usually associated with …
A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights
Although hundreds of thousands of people died fighting in the American Civil War, perhaps the war's biggest casualty was the nation's legal order. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction explores the implications of this major change by bringing legal history into dialogue with the scholarship of other historical fields. Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction amendments, are the best-known legal inno…
Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights
What Constitutes a Region: What Constitutes a Region
Journal Article What Constitutes a Region? Get access Laura F. Edwards Laura F. Edwards Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 36, Issue 3, June 2012, Pages 483–486, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2012.01035.x Published: 24 April 2012
The History in “Critical Legal Histories”: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125
This commentary explores Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” from the perspective of the discipline of history. It argues that we are still stalled at the intellectual juncture that Gordon described so well twenty-five years ago because functionalism and the resulting problems that Gordon addresses in the area of sociolegal studies also pervade the discipline of history. The results reinforce the divide between sociolegal studies and other…
Status without Rights: African Americans and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South
DURING THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, black southerners regularly made claims through formal legal channels. The documentary record—which is voluminous at the federal, state, and local levels—has inspired a new generation of scholarship that explores how former slaves used the legal system to express and pursue their goals as free people.1 Generally, historians place African Americans’ actions
Enslaved women and the law: Paradoxes of subordination in the post-Revolutionary Carolinas
Focusing on court cases in North and South Carolina, 1787–1840, this article argues that enslaved women occupied acknowledged spaces within southern law and even shaped its application and content. The analysis examines enslaved women's legal standing within the context of state-building following the American Revolution. Although historians of U.S. slavery usually look to statutes and appellate decisions, this body of law – and its impersonal, a…
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a dramatic history of the South in the years leading up to and following the Civil War: a history that focuses on the women, black and white, rich and poor, who made up the fabric of southern life before the war and remade themselves and their world after it. Positing the household as the central institution of southern society, Edwards delineates the inseparable links between domestic relations and civil and…
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era
Journal Article Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. By Laura F. Edwards. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. xii, 271 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-252-02568-7.) Get access Jane Dailey Jane Dailey Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 2, September 2001, Pages 654–655, https://doi.org/10.…
Law, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in the Antebellum South
Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction
Gendered Strife & Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction
Journal Article Gendered Strife & Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. By Laura F. Edwards. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xviii, 378 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-252-02297-1. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-252-06600-6.) Get access Elizabeth R. Varon Elizabeth R. Varon Wellesley College Wellesley, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 84, Issue 4…
Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Confederate Woman's Life
Chapter 1 Illustrations Chapter 2 Editor's Foreword Chapter 3 Acknowledgments Chapter 4 Introduction Chapter 5 Southern Daughter: World Seemed a Place Where One Could be Very Jolly Chapter 6 Marriage & Politics: I Take This Somnolent Life Coolly Chapter 7 1860-1861: Lincoln Was Elected and Our Fate Sealed Chapter 8 1862: We Have No Breathing Time Given Us Chapter 9 1863: Anxiety Pervades Chapter 10 1864: Deep Waters Are Closing Over Us Chapter 11…
The Marriage Covenant is at the Foundation of all Our Rights”: The Politics of Slave Marriages in North Carolina after Emancipation
In the fall of 1865, North Carolina lawmakers gathered in Raleigh to draw up a new constitution. Despite the absence of the most extreme secessionists, those in attendance were still a remarkably homogeneous group of planters, businessmen, and professionals—white men of the same wealthy families that had always governed the state. Yet faced with the sweeping changes wrought by war and emancipation, they anticipated a difficult session. Edwin Read…
The Disappearance of Susan Daniel and Henderson Cooper: Gender and Narratives of Political Conflict in the Reconstruction-Era U.S. South
Laura F. Edwards, The Disappearance of Susan Daniel and Henderson Cooper: Gender and Narratives of Political Conflict in the Reconstruction-Era U.S. South, Feminist Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 363-386
Constant Change: Housing Policy in Scotland
It is written at a time when homelessness levels are high throughout Europe, when young people particularly face exclusion from housing and employment, and when sweeping changes have radically altered the routes into housing for those citizens who have limited incomes and therefore limited housing choice and where, despite major legislative change which attempted to revitalize the private rented sector, the main housing options remain owner-occup…
Black Belt Scalawag: Charles Hays and the Southern Republicans in the Era of Reconstruction
New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States
Journal Article New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States. By Marjorie Spruill Wheeler. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xxii, 280 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-19-507583-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-508245-1.) Get access Laura F. Edwards Laura F. Edwards University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American H…
The History in “Critical Legal Histories”: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125
This commentary explores Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” from the perspective of the discipline of history. It argues that we are still stalled at the intellectual juncture that Gordon described so well twenty-five years ago because functionalism and the resulting problems that Gordon addresses in the area of sociolegal studies also pervade the discipline of history. The results reinforce the divide between sociolegal studies and other…
Law, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in the Antebellum South
New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States
Journal Article New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States. By Marjorie Spruill Wheeler. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xxii, 280 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-19-507583-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-508245-1.) Get access Laura F. Edwards Laura F. Edwards University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American H…
Constant Change: Housing Policy in Scotland
It is written at a time when homelessness levels are high throughout Europe, when young people particularly face exclusion from housing and employment, and when sweeping changes have radically altered the routes into housing for those citizens who have limited incomes and therefore limited housing choice and where, despite major legislative change which attempted to revitalize the private rented sector, the main housing options remain owner-occup…
Black Belt Scalawag: Charles Hays and the Southern Republicans in the Era of Reconstruction
The Marriage Covenant is at the Foundation of all Our Rights”: The Politics of Slave Marriages in North Carolina after Emancipation
In the fall of 1865, North Carolina lawmakers gathered in Raleigh to draw up a new constitution. Despite the absence of the most extreme secessionists, those in attendance were still a remarkably homogeneous group of planters, businessmen, and professionals—white men of the same wealthy families that had always governed the state. Yet faced with the sweeping changes wrought by war and emancipation, they anticipated a difficult session. Edwin Read…
The Disappearance of Susan Daniel and Henderson Cooper: Gender and Narratives of Political Conflict in the Reconstruction-Era U.S. South
Laura F. Edwards, The Disappearance of Susan Daniel and Henderson Cooper: Gender and Narratives of Political Conflict in the Reconstruction-Era U.S. South, Feminist Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 363-386
Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Confederate Woman's Life
Chapter 1 Illustrations Chapter 2 Editor's Foreword Chapter 3 Acknowledgments Chapter 4 Introduction Chapter 5 Southern Daughter: World Seemed a Place Where One Could be Very Jolly Chapter 6 Marriage & Politics: I Take This Somnolent Life Coolly Chapter 7 1860-1861: Lincoln Was Elected and Our Fate Sealed Chapter 8 1862: We Have No Breathing Time Given Us Chapter 9 1863: Anxiety Pervades Chapter 10 1864: Deep Waters Are Closing Over Us Chapter 11…
Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction
Gendered Strife & Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction
Journal Article Gendered Strife & Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. By Laura F. Edwards. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xviii, 378 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-252-02297-1. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-252-06600-6.) Get access Elizabeth R. Varon Elizabeth R. Varon Wellesley College Wellesley, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 84, Issue 4…
Law, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in the Antebellum South
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a dramatic history of the South in the years leading up to and following the Civil War: a history that focuses on the women, black and white, rich and poor, who made up the fabric of southern life before the war and remade themselves and their world after it. Positing the household as the central institution of southern society, Edwards delineates the inseparable links between domestic relations and civil and…
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era
Journal Article Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. By Laura F. Edwards. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. xii, 271 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-252-02568-7.) Get access Jane Dailey Jane Dailey Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 2, September 2001, Pages 654–655, https://doi.org/10.…
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era
Enslaved women and the law: Paradoxes of subordination in the post-Revolutionary Carolinas
Focusing on court cases in North and South Carolina, 1787–1840, this article argues that enslaved women occupied acknowledged spaces within southern law and even shaped its application and content. The analysis examines enslaved women's legal standing within the context of state-building following the American Revolution. Although historians of U.S. slavery usually look to statutes and appellate decisions, this body of law – and its impersonal, a…
Status without Rights: African Americans and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South
DURING THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, black southerners regularly made claims through formal legal channels. The documentary record—which is voluminous at the federal, state, and local levels—has inspired a new generation of scholarship that explores how former slaves used the legal system to express and pursue their goals as free people.1 Generally, historians place African Americans’ actions
What Constitutes a Region: What Constitutes a Region
Journal Article What Constitutes a Region? Get access Laura F. Edwards Laura F. Edwards Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 36, Issue 3, June 2012, Pages 483–486, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2012.01035.x Published: 24 April 2012
The History in “Critical Legal Histories”: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125
This commentary explores Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” from the perspective of the discipline of history. It argues that we are still stalled at the intellectual juncture that Gordon described so well twenty-five years ago because functionalism and the resulting problems that Gordon addresses in the area of sociolegal studies also pervade the discipline of history. The results reinforce the divide between sociolegal studies and other…
A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights
Although hundreds of thousands of people died fighting in the American Civil War, perhaps the war's biggest casualty was the nation's legal order. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction explores the implications of this major change by bringing legal history into dialogue with the scholarship of other historical fields. Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction amendments, are the best-known legal inno…
Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights
Law as Social History
This chapter explores two related themes embedded within the relationship between legal history and social history, focusing on the nineteenth century to highlight conceptual points that also apply more generally to other periods. First, it argues the field of legal history takes a broader understanding of the law than other historical fields. Moving beyond the written records, legal officials, and designated institutions usually associated with …
Response to Rebecca Scott's “Discerning a Dignitary Offense”
I applaud Scott's contributions. In this comment, I would like to take them up and push them further. Doing so points to a very different understanding of people's relationship to law and the legal system in the nineteenth century than is now current in much of the historiography. That perspective, I argue, can transform our understanding of the law and legal change in the Civil War era and in the nineteenth century more broadly
James and His Striped Velvet Pantaloons: Textiles, Commerce, and the Law in the New Republic
Trunks, Legal Texts, and the Materiality of Law in the Nineteenth Century
To say that everyone had a trunk in the nineteenth century is an overstatement, but only just. Even the enslaved and married women had trunks. Within those trunks were things that their owners called their property, which may seem odd, given that many of the trunks’ possessors did not have the rights considered necessary to own anything at all. As this article shows, trunks enabled legal claims to property and connections to place. Those principl…
Women’s Property and the Downward Spiral into Fraud: Questioning the Persistent Narrative of Progress in Women’s Legal Status
This article challenges the narratives that we tell ourselves about women’s history in the nineteenth century, particularly narratives that celebrate progress in the legal status of women, based on the acquisition of rights. As it shows, legal changes in the nineteenth century lumped all women into an artificially reductive category “women,” separated them from their families’ property, and turned those claims into something so problematic that t…
Historians and the Courts
This Q&A explores the benefits of and challenges to translating historical scholarship for a legal audience. MAH editorial board member Sarah A. Seo (NYU Law School) asked historian-experts Laura Edwards (Princeton University), Jennifer Mittelstadt (Rutgers University–New Brunswick), collaborators Samuel Erman (University of Michigan Law School) and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (University of Southern California), as well as Maggie Blackhawk (NYU Law Sc…
Political science (21 works) · Law (18 works) · History (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · History (13 works) · Law (12 works) · American History and Culture (11 works) · Art (8 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (6 works) · Legal history (6 works)