In this revelatory book, Laura Edwards explains the extraordinary significance that textiles once held in the American economy and legal system. A book of scrupulous research and a profoundly revisionist account of the workings of property, gender and the law in America between the Revolution and the 1860s.
Laura F. Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University. She is the award-winning author of A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South, and Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. This is her first project that connects her longstanding needlework interests with her historical work.