LAURA F. EDWARDS is the Peabody Family Professor of History at Duke University. Her research and teaching focuses on women, gender, and the law in the nineteenth-century, particularly the U.S. South. She has received fellowships from the American Bar Foundation,the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Newberry Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution, and her book The People and Their Peace was awarded the Charles Sydnor Prize for the best book in Southern history by the Southern Historical Association and the Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in American Law and Society by the American Historical Association.