Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States Hardcover by Laura F. Edwards

Description

Author: Edwards Laura F.

Package Dimensions: 0x0x788

Number Of Pages: 456

Release Date: 24-02-2022

Details: Product Description
An innovative recasting of US legal and economic history through the power of clothing for those who lacked power and status in American society.

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 entree 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.

Based on painstaking archival research from fifteen states,
Only the Clothes on Her Back reconstructs this hidden history of power, tracing it from the governing order of the early republic in which textiles’ legal principles flourished to the textiles’ legal downfall in the mid-nineteenth century
when they were crowded out by the rising power of rights.

Review
“Laura Edwards has produced a masterpiece that forever changes how we see the nineteenth century’s ubiquitous textiles and the women who worked, stole, hoarded and wore them. Only a scholar like Edwards, with insights that go beyond conventional notions of property and ownership, could recover the
astonishing stories about how those without rights still exercised legal dominion over fabric and their economic lives.
Only the Clothes on Her Back smartly debunks simple cultural truisms about women and their adornments, revealing how ordinary Americans, even those marginalized in public law,
connected to global markets and remade those forces by their own terms in the local courthouses of the early Republic.” — Martha S. Jones, author of
Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

“With elegance, creativity, and a fitting touch of wit, Laura Edwards unfolds the world of early American textiles in this brilliantly original study of gender, race, material exchange, and the law. The seemingly small arena of gowns, sheets, and hosiery as revealed through her careful research
proves massively impactful to those who were marginalized by society as well as to merchants and manufacturers. While enslaved people, free Blacks, and white women could not claim personal rights, they could and did own all manner of fabrics, which they saved, traded, and defended in a complex legal
culture that defies our modern expectations but would not last.
The Clothes on Her Back transforms our understanding not only of lace, looms, and law, but also of nineteenth-century American lives.” — Tiya Miles, author of
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family

Keepsake

“In
Only the Clothes on Her Back, Laura Edwards combines daunting archival research with a brilliant synthesis of generations of scholarship to put women, both Black and white, at the heart of American legal and economic history between the Revolution and the Civil War. Laced with wit, and knitting
race, class, and gender into a seamless fabric, Edwards poignantly and powerfully brings hom