Edwards, Laura F.

PERSONAL:

Education: Northwestern University, B.A., 1985; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, M.A., 1987, Ph.D., 1991.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Duke University, 231 Carr Bldg., Durham, NC 27708. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, historian, and educator. Duke University, professor of history.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Martin Luther King, Jr., Award, 1992; Research and Creative Scholarship Award, Research Council, University of South Florida, 1994; Monticello College Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, 1994; Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC, 1995; Presidential Young Faculty Award, University of South Florida, 1996-97; Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award, 1997; Vernon Carstensen Award, Agricultural History Society, for best article published in agricultural history, 1998; research fellow, American Center for Politics and Public Policy, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998-99; Fletcher M. Green and Charles W. Ramsdell Award, Southern Historical Association, for best article published in the Journal of Southern History, 1998-99; National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship for University Professors, 1999-2000.

WRITINGS:

Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1997.

Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2000.

Contributor to books, including Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, edited by Donald Nieman and Christopher Waldrep, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2000; The Blackwell Companion to the American South, 2001; The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century America, 2001; and Beyond Black & White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest, edited by Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, University of Texas Arlington by Texas A&M University Press (College Station, TX), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Slavery & Abolition, Journal of Southern History, Agricultural History, Reviews in American History, Law and History Review, Tampa Bay History, North Carolina Historical Review, and Feminist Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author and historian Laura F. Edwards is a professor of history at Duke University, where she concentrates on issues of women, gender, and the law in the nineteenth-century American South. In Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction, Edwards focuses on post-Civil War events in Granville County, North Carolina, and surrounding areas, providing a "careful scrutiny of ‘the political culture of reconstruction’ while not neglecting the social culture of the time," observed reviewer Janet Harrison Shannon in Signs. She considers Reconstruction from the perspective of both men and women, rich and poor, black and white, North and South, in a book that is "rich in detail" and that "attests to Edwards's extraordinary research skills," Shannon commented. Broken into six chapters, the book covers "marriage, childhood, household arrangements, and labor and civil and political rights," Shannon noted. Edwards concludes that gender, in combination with race and class, was a potent force for shaping politics in the Reconstruction-era South.

With Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era, Edwards "endeavors to look behind the facade of Scarlett O'Hara and her idyllic Tara plantation and discover the complexities of southern womanhood," commented Derek W. Frisby on Humanities and Social Sciences Online. The book is an "elegantly written and thoughtfully constructed work [that] introduces readers to a range of themes and tensions in the family history and wider social history of the mid-nineteenth-century South," observed Bruce Collins in the Historian. Edwards focuses her study on a number of black and white women of the time, examining political, social, and economic issues that faced women of both races from the early antebellum years to a few decades following the end of the Civil War. She looks at the experiences of several Southern women whose writings about their lives have survived and made them notable contemporary figures, including Kate Stone, Gertrude Clanton Thomas, and Harriet Jacobs. She uses their individual experiences to speak to broader themes that faced women in the Civil War era, such as the ways in which the household and the public sector intersected and influenced each other. "Edwards's finely crafted study follows the theme that women of all classes were active, not inactive, in asserting their identity and rights," noted Joseph E. Steelman, writing in History: Review of New Books. Reviewer Sally G. McMillen, writing in the Journal of Southern History, remarked favorably on Edwards's "graceful writing. Often the prose sparkles, making this a book that is enjoyable to read and intellectually challenging."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Historian, spring-summer, 2002, Bruce Collins, review of Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era, p. 744.

History: Review of New Books, fall, 2000, Joseph F. Steelman, review of Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore, p. 12.

Journal of Southern History, May, 2002, Sally G. McMillen, review of Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore, p. 454.

Signs, spring, 2000, Janet Harrison Shannon, review of Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction, p. 908.

ONLINE

Duke University Web site,http://www.duke.edu/ (December 2, 2006), curriculum vitae of Laura F. Edwards.

Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.hnet.org/reviews/ (January, 2001), Derek W. Frisby, review of Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore; (April, 2006), Amy Meschke Porter, review of Beyond Black & White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest.

Organization of American Historians Web site,http://www.oah.org/ (December 2, 2006), biography of Laura F. Edwards.