Laura Edwards

Laura F. Edwards is an American historian. She has authored five books on U.S. history: Gendered Strife and Confusion, Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore (2000), The People and their Peace (2009), A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2015), and Only the Clothes on Her Back (2022).

Originally an oboist as a student, she became interested in history during high school. After obtaining a PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she became a professor at the University of South Florida, University of California, Los Angeles, and Duke University, before becoming Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University. She is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and has won several awards for her work, including the 2023 Merle Curti Award for Social History. She has served as president of the Southern Association for Women Historians (2008) and the Southern Historical Association (2026).

Early life Edwards, an only child, was born to Sandra ( Rennich) and Robert Edwards. Her doctoral dissertation was The politics of manhood and womanhood: reconstruction in Granville County, North Carolina. Around this time, she worked at the Newberry Library as an administrative assistant at their Family and Community History Center (1990–1992). She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on American legal history. She won the American Historical Association's 2009 Littleton-Griswold Prize and the Southern Historical Association's 2010 Charles S. Sydnor Award for her 2009 book The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South. In 2012, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Law. Another book, Only the Clothes on Her Back (2022), won several awards: the 2022 Society for the History of the Early Republic Best Book Prize, the 2023 American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid Prize, and the 2023 Merle Curti Award for Social History. She is also author of Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997), Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (2001), and A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (2015), and she was an associate editor for A New History of the American South (2023). She was named president of the Southern Historical Association in 2026.

Works Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997) Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (2000) The People and their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009) A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (2015) Only the Clothes on Her Back (2022)