Scholars@Duke

• Background
• 

  Education, Training, & Certifications

  • Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1991
  • M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1987
  • B.A., Northwestern University 1985
• 

  Duke Appointment History

  • Associate Professor in Women's Studies, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2003 - 2006
  • Associate Professor of History, History, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2001 - 2005
  • Associate Chair, History, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2003 - 2004
  • Visiting Associate Professor, History, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences 2000 - 2001
• Recognition
• 

  In the News

  • AUG 3, 2015

    A Legal History of the Civil War

  • AUG 3, 2015

    New Books in Law

    Podcast: Laura Edwards talks about her book, ‘A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights’

  • JUL 1, 2015

    Laura Edwards: The Dual Heritage of the Confederate Flag

  • APR 7, 2015

    McClatchy DC

    Laura Edwards comments: ‘Hillary’ by any other name would still be controversial

  • APR 8, 2013

    Teaching and Mentoring Excellence
• 

  Awards & Honors

  • Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring. The Graduate School, Duke University. 2013
  • Charles Sydnor Prize for Best Book in Southern History. Southern Historical Association. 2010
  • Howard D. Johnson Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching. Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University. 2010
  • Littleton-Griswold Prize for Best Book in American Law and Society. American Historical Association. 2009
  • Fletcher M. Green and Charles W. Ramsdell Award for Best Article Published in the Journal of Southern History for the Years 1998-1999. Southern Historical Association. 2000
  • Vernon Carstensen Award for Best Article Published in Agricultural History in 1998. Agricultural History Society. 1999
  • Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award. American Library Association. 1998
• Expertise
• 

  Global Scholarship

  • Expertise

    • United States of America (Country) 
• Publications & Artistic Works
• 

  Selected Publications

  • Books

    • Edwards, LF. A Nation of Rights: A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
    • Edwards, LF. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
    • Edwards, LF. Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
    • Edwards, LF. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
    • Edwards, LF. Only the Clothes on Her Back: Women, Textiles, and National Development in the Nineteenth-Century United States (In preparation). .

  • Book Sections

    • Edwards, LF. "Reconstruction and the History of Governance." In The World the War Made, edited by G Downs and K Masur, 30-44. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. (Essay)
    • Edwards, LF. "Laura Edwards on the Early Republic, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Women’s History." In The Historians Behind the History: Conversations with Southern Historians, edited by M Bever and S Suarze. Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama press, 2015.
    • Edwards, LF. "Epilogue (In preparation)." In Rethinking Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for African American Freedom, edited by W Link. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
    • Edwards, LF. "Reconstruction and the history of governance." In The World the Civil War Made, 22-45. January 1, 2015.
    • Edwards, LF. "The Material Conditions of Dependency: The Hidden History of Free Women’s Control of Property in the Early Nineteenth Century South." In Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History, edited by S Hadden and P Minter, 171-92. University of Georgia Press, 2013. (Essay)
    • Edwards, LF. "The Contradictions of Democracy in American Institutions." In Democracy from Book to Life: Language and Practice in the North Atlantic 1750-1850, edited by J Innes and M Philp, 40-54. Oxford University Press, 2013. (Essay)
    • Edwards, LF. "Up from the Pedestal: The Influence of Anne Scott's Ladies on Southern Women's History." In Writing Women's History: A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott, edited by E Payne, 28-63. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. (Essay)
    • Edwards, LF. "Reconstruction, Women, and Political Culture." In Reconstruction in North Carolina, edited by PD Escott. University of North Carolina Press, 2008. (Essay)
    • Edwards, LF. "The Civil War and Reconstruction." In The Cambridge History of Law in America: Volume 2, The Long Nineteenth Century, edited by C Tomlins and M Grossberg, 313-344. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008. (Essay)
    • Edwards, LF. "Emancipation and its consequences." In A Companion to the American South, 269-283. November 30, 2007.  Full Text
    • Edwards, LF. "The People’s Sovereignty and the Law: Defining Gender, Race, and Class Differences in the Antebellum South." In Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the United States South and Southwest, edited by S Cole, 3-34. Arlington, Texas: University of Texas Press for the University of Texas, Arlington, 2004.
    • Edwards, LF. "Women, Gender, and Labor." In The Blackwell Companion to 19th Century America, edited by WL Barney and LF Edwards, 223-37. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Limited, 2001.
    • Edwards, LF. "Women and Domestic Violence in Nineteenth-Century North Carolina." In Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, edited by M Bellesiles, 115-36. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
    • Edwards, LF. "Captives of Wilmington: The Riot and Historical Memories of Political Conflict, 1865-1898." In Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, edited by TB Tyson and DS Cecelski, 113-41. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
    • Edwards, LF. "U.S. Women’s History." In Encyclopedia of Social History, 775-777. New York: Garland, 1994.

  • Conference Papers

    • Edwards, LF. "Textiles: Popular culture and the law." January 1, 2016.

  • Journal Articles

    • Edwards, LF. "Sarah Allingham's Sheet and Other Lessons from Legal History." Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 1 (2018): 121-147.  Full Text
    • Edwards, LF. "The History in "Critical Legal Histories": Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57-125." LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY-JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN BAR FOUNDATION 37, no. 1 (2012): 187-199.  Full Text  Link to Item
    • Edwards, LF. "The Peace: The Meaning and Production of Law in the Post-Revolutionary United States." University of California, Irvine Law Review 1 (September 2011): 565-85.
    • Edwards, LF. "Southern History as US History." JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY 75, no. 3 (August 2009): 533-564.  Link to Item
    • Edwards, LF. "The Forgotten Legal World of Thomas Ruffin: The Power of Presentism in the History of Slave Law." North Carolina Law Review 87 (March 2009): 855-900.
    • Edwards, LF. "Status Without Rights: African American and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South." American Historical Review 112 (April 2007): 365-393.
    • Edwards, LF. "Enslaved Women and the Law: The Paradoxes of Subordination in the Post-Revolutionary Carolinas." Slavery & Abolition 26 (August 2005): 305-323.
    • Edwards, LF. "Law, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in the Antebellum South." Journal of Southern History 65 (November 1999): 733-70.
    • Edwards, LF. "The Problem of Dependency: African Americans, Labor Relations, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South." Agricultural History 72 (1998): 313-40.
    • Edwards, and LF, . "’The Marriage Covenant Is at the Foundation of All Our Rights’: The Politics of Slave Marriages in North Carolina after Emancipation." Law and History Review 14 (1996): 81-124.
    • Edwards, LF. "Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction, and the Extension of Patriarchy in Granville County, North Carolina." North Carolina Historical Review 68 (1991): 237-260.
    • Edwards, LF. "The Disappearance of Susan Daniel and Henderson Cooper: Gender and Narratives of Political Conflict in the Reconstruction-Era U.S. South(Accepted)." Feminist Studies 22, no. 2: 363-363.  Full Text

  • Other Articles

    • Edwards, LF. "You Can’t Go Home Again: Politics, War, and Domestic Life in the Nineteenth-Century South." Reviews in American History 25 (1997): 570-76.
    • Edwards, LF. "Women and Work in Florida: A Photographic Essay." Tampa Bay History 18 (1996): 32-48.
• Teaching & Mentoring
• 

  Recent Courses

  • HISTORY 120: A History of American Democracy: Everything You Need to Know about US History in One Semester 2018
  • HISTORY 299: Women and Popular Culture in U.S. History 2018
  • HISTORY 335: United States Legal History 2018
  • HISTORY 792: Reading Topics-Independent Study 2018
  • HISTORY 790S-06: Topics in Law and Society 2017
  • HISTORY 461S: Capstone Seminar: Clothing and U.S. History 2016
  • HISTORY 791: Reading Topics: Independent Study 2016
• Scholarly, Clinical, & Service Activities
• 

  Presentations & Appearances

  • "Law Outside the Nation: Overlapping Jurisdictions and Conflicting Conceptions of Citizenship, Keynote Address for the Conference, "Citizenship in the Era of the American Civil War," the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, Virginia Tech. April 2015  2015
  • "Looking at Nation-Building through Local Eyes: Rethinking Law in the Reconstruction-Era United States, Milton Klein Lecture, History Department University of Tennessee. March 2014  2014
  • "Reconstruction, Rights, and the Nation's Legal Culture," for the conference, "The World the Civil War Made," the Civil War Era Center, Penn State University. June 2013  2013
  • "Law and Culture in Conversation," Keynote Address for the Conference, "Disrobing the Law in American Culture: The 2013 American Studies Graduate Student Conference," Princeton University. April 2013  2013
  • "Women, the Civil War, and the Legal Transformation of the United States, " 2013 Annual Gary C. and Eleanor G. Simons Lecture, University of Florida. April 2013  2013
  • "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture in the Post-Revolutionary South," Third Annual Society of the Cincinnati Lecture, Virginia Commonwealth University. November 2012  2012
  • "How Legal History Can Help Us Redefine the Contours of Southern History," Keynote Address, Southern Intellectual History Conference, University of Alabama. February 2011  2011
  • "The Meaning of Democracy in the Post-Revolutionary United States," for the conference, "Two Eras of Democracy," Oxford University, England. June 2010  2010
  • “The Perils of Inclusion: Democracy in the Early Nineteenth-Century United States," Workshop on Democracy in Context, Oxford, England, June 2008.. June 1, 2008  2008
• 

  Service to the Profession

  • Littleton-Griswold Book Prize Committee, American Historical Association. American Historical Association. 2015 - 2017  2015 - 2017
  • Chair, Program Committee. Southern Historical Association. 2014  2014
  • Fellowship Selection Committee. American Council of Learned Societies. 2014 - 2016  2014 - 2016
  • Cromwell Book Prize Committee, American Society for Legal History. 2012 - 2014  2012 - 2014
  • Executive Committee, Southern Historical Association. 2009 - 2012  2009 - 2012
  • President. Southern Association of Women HIstorians. 2007 - 2008  2007 - 2008
  • Board of Directors. American Society for Legal HIstory. 2003 - 2006  2003 - 2006

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