We continue our posts on honors and prizes awarded at the recent annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History with the John Philip Reid Book Prize, which was awarded to Laura F. Edwards, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2022). Here is the citation:
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Laura Edwards
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Laura Edwards’
Only the Clothes on Her Back accomplishes the rare feat of making visible a world that has largely escaped the attention of historians. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book shows that in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, marginalized people lacking formal, civil rights to property—including married women, free Blacks, and enslaved persons—were able to turn to courts to secure their ability to deploy textiles as an important form of currency, credit, and capital. Conceptually innovative and beautifully written, this is a pathbreaking study that challenges conventional understandings of rights, ownership, and power.
--Dan Ernst
