Overview

What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American society? In the hands of eminent historian Laura F. Edwards, these textiles tell a revealing story of ordinary people and how they made use of their material goods' economic and legal value in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. Only the Clothes on Her Back uncovers practices, commonly known then, but now long forgotten, which made textiles--clothing, cloth, bedding, and accessories, such as shoes and hats--a unique form of property that people without rights could own and exchange. The value of textiles depended on law, and it was law that turned these goods into a secure form of property for marginalized people, who not only used these textiles as currency, credit, and capital, but also as entr�e into the new republic's economy and governing institutions. Edwards grounds the laws relating to textiles in engaging stories from the lives of everyday Americans. Wives wove linen and kept the proceeds, enslaved people traded coats and shoes, and poor people invested in fabrics, which they carefully preserved in trunks. Edwards shows that these stories are about far more than cloth and clothing; they reshape our understanding of law and the economy in America.

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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. Only the Clothes on Her Back is her first project that connects her longstanding needlework interests with her historical work. Stephanie Richardson records audiobooks from her professional home studio near the mountains in Utah. She places a special emphasis on bringing positive and wholesome content in the world and records work in a variety of nonfiction and fiction genres, including self-development, memoir, children's and young adult, and cozy mystery. She has trained with award-winning narrators PJ Ochlan and Sean Pratt and was awarded the ABR award for best mystery in 2020. While not enjoying a book, she can be found playing zoo-keeper to her four rambunctious children, playing nerdy board games, or talking to her plants.

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