Laura F. Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty and Faculty Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. She focuses on the legal history of the nineteenth-century United States, with an emphasis on people’s interactions with law and the legal system. Her most recent book, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States, which received the Merle Curti award for the best book in social history from the Organization of American Historians, combines material culture and legal history to reconstruct the economic world created by legal principles that allowed even people without rights to make legal claims to clothing, cloth, and related accessories. She is also author of four other books, most recently, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (2015) and The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009). She has received fellowships from the Newberry Library, the National Humanities Center, the NEH, the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Bar Foundation.
