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Transcripts For CSPAN3 Laura Edwards Only The Clothes On Her Back 20220801

session of the washington history seminar to order. i want to welcome everyone to this seminar subtitled historical perspectives on international and national affairs this afternoon. we will be focusing on a new book by the princeton historian laura edwards titled only the clothes on her back clothing and the hidden history of power in the 19th century united states published by oxford university, press in late, february and joining us this afternoon as discussions are martha jones of john's hopkins and megan sweeney of the university of michigan. i'm eric arneson from the george washington university co-chair of the washington history seminar along with my colleague christian osterman of the wilson center who cannot be here today. the washington industry seminar is a collaborative non-partisan venture of the woodrow wilson center's history and public policy program and the american historical associations national history center. and for over the past decade the seminar has been meeting weekly and pre-covid times in person at the wilson center and since the pandemic well, here in the virtual realm behind the scenes two people make these seminars possible pete bierstecker of the wilson center and rachel wheatley of the national history center, and i'd like to thank institutional supporters the george washington university department of history in particular as well as a number of anonymous individual donors. and as i say every week, we invite you to join their ranks. on the logistics front, please note. today's session is being recorded and can soon be found on our institutions respective websites and crucially when we get to the question and answer section of the webinar, we ask those with questions to use the raise hand function on zoom or the q&a function not chat and to those watching on facebook live. you can email questions to rachel wheatley at our weekly our wh e a t l e y at historians.org, and we will call on as many folks as we can we prefer for you to raise hand and pose the question yourself. otherwise, i have to pose it for you. all right with that it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker this afternoon laura edwards, who is the class of 1921 bicentennial professor in the history of american law and liberty in history department at princeton university. her work focuses on the legal history of the 19th century united states with an emphasis on people's interactions with the law and the legal system. she's the author of a number of books a legal history of the civil war and reconstruction a nation of rights published in 2015, and the people and their peace legal culture and the transformation of inequality in the post-revolutionary south 2000. nine a book that was awarded the american historical associations littleton griswold prize for the best book and law in society and the southern historical associations charles sydney price for the best book in southern history. she's received fellowship from the newberry library the national humanity center national endowment for the humanities the acls the bogan high foundation and the american bar foundation. and today we're delighted that she's here speaking about her most recent book only the clothes on her back clothing and the hidden history of power in the 19th century united states. laura the screen is all yours. welcome. to the washington history seminar thank you so much for having me and thank you for the lovely introduction and thank you to megan and martha for coming today as well. so i'm gonna start with a story because the book is full of stories. so i'm gonna begin with six women in a sheet. so all of these women and the sheet appeared in new york city's municipal court in 1804, and actually it was the sheet that started at all which is apropos because this book is about a textiles. so one of the women sarah allingham charged another woman judith friel was stealing the sheet. although these charges really that's the oversimplified this whole situation. so judith frio was a washer woman who just happened to have the sheet amongst the dirty laundry. she was collecting that day. so imagine her consternation where sarah ellingham ran out into the street way later grabbed up her bundles and began rummaging through them and the city streets loudly actually remington three of them. so when allingham found which she insisted was hershey she announced her discovery and marched off with it to file charges in the new york. city's mayor's court and judicial was following in her way. so once in court, it became clear that judith friel was in fact really transporting that she to her house to be washed. it was another woman sally riley who had taken it nearly a year earlier. so riley had been sold it to rosanna morara. this is getting confusing who's bundle of laundry was the one that contained the sheet so both of those women joined the other two making four women and a sheet in court then two more women appeared as witnesses to support roseanna moraris claims that she had purchased a sheep from sally riley bringing us to six women and a sheep. so ultimately the court listen to all this they awarded the sheet to rose anniversara. so case closed but actually not really robert given conventional historical wisdom. this dispute never really should have made it to court at all. these were poor women. they're squabbling over a cheap sheet and more to the point. they were married women encumbered by coverture. a collection of legal principles limited wives legal rights and subordinated them to their husbands among other things coverage of prohibited women from owning property and prosecuting court cases in their own name more than that covered sugar gave husband's legal rights to property in their wives and property that their wives bought into marriage and anything that they acquired afterward by those rules. sarah allingham could not own a she let alone prosecutor case to claim ownership. yet and sarah allenham's case officials accepted both the women's claims two property and their access to the legal system. they did ultimately give a nod to coverture's rules. they identified the prosecutor as allen hans husband attributing ownership of the sheet to him, but after filling in the obligatory boxes officials dispense with this fiction that the matter at anything due to the husbands. in fact, they were not in court at all for the court officials as well as the women involve. the question was which married woman possessed the sheet not whether a married woman could possess it. now to make things more interesting here this case was not at all unusual between the revolution and the civil war courts the united states regularly dealt with similar cases cases involving claims by people on the legal margins often people without property rights at all to clothing related accessories such as hats and handkerchiefs as well as uncut cloth and bed linens. so how could people without property rights claim property? and that is the question that i explore in this book only the closer back. the answers i argue lie in the legal qualities that attach to clothing so people without property rights including married women and enslaved people relied on long-standing legal principles. that attach clothing to the person who wore it, but they did not stop there through use. they expanded those legal principles to make legal claims to all kinds of textiles and accessories that they made or that simply passed you their hands because it was textiles and something related to cloth they could keep this they could make legal claims to it and then they went further using the security provided by law to turn these goods into currency into capital and collateral for credit which gave them an entry point into governing institutions and the economy. people like sarah allen ham. we're not on the outside looking in as we have usually assumed they actually use textiles to include themselves in governing institutions and the economy and they really made law this way insisting on the recognition of commonly held legal principles that unlike property rights app. broadly to everyone so the first of our sarah ellington's she was not really that unusual once you start looking for textiles you realize that they're everywhere people made them. they sold them they talked about them. they thought about them all the time yet scholars from period period between the revolution and the civil war have tended to kind of walk by such property and assume that it was more like consumer goods and instead focus on the kind of property land enslaved property commodities owned by elite white men the minority of the population the textiles in this period were not just consumer goods. they too were valuable property and valuable property that unlike other forms of property. most americans could legally own. so by the time of the revolution the accountant the economics of textiles had hit really kind of a sweet spot would have been luxury goods before we're now more affordable and more available and not so cheap is to be completely worthless quality mattered and people knew quality broad range of americans including the -- and slave could spot find linens silk wool at 10 paces and they could assess trimming such as ribbon and bridge just as accurately and that knowledge was i'm prominent display in theft cases across the united states parties to these cases were describe coughing clothing in great detail distinguishing cheap goods from expensive ones and rattling up information about fiber content colors and patterns that most people today would never notice let alone remember and all the details function like figures on a banknote actually in fact textiles were preferable to things notes for most for many americans. the possession of banknotes was suspect for poor people and people without property rights. the presumption was that they should not have them and so if they did it was suspicious but not so with the possession of textiles because the legal principles of associated with them gave people claims to them textiles also had economic advantages over banknotes because they actually held their value more reliably the material qualities of textiles suited them for use this currency as well. there was considerable consensus as to their value. they were extremely liquid and they came in different denominations, which was handy. they ran the gamut from handkerchiefs, which you could used by small things and big expensive links of cloth, which you could use to buy more expensive things. when people traded in these goods, they were not bartering they valued items and pounds or dollars and then bought and sold accordingly and leverage the value of textiles as people did with other property pawning them lending them or saving them to fund future ventures. the result was this vast secondary market, which provided not just access to goods, but also a means to circulate them. so this part of the market was kind of everywhere and nowhere in particular it included palm brookers auctioneers pedalers grocers tavern keepers tailors dressmakers unlicensed shotkeepers vendors and open air markets as well as individuals who just sold on the streets and from their homes. and to say that this market was underground or informal actually misconstrues, its institutional underpinnings, which depended on widely recognized enforced rules ownership was established through relationship to the goods as witnessed by other people through possession through use and display wearing was a really good way to establish ownership. so was buying and selling in public. sarah allingham ultimately lost her she to rose annamarara because rosanna marra had exactly the kind of evidence that proved possession and took the place of the information. i received she had witnesses who could describe the property and value it connected to the purported owner provide the data purchase verify the transaction and she actually had the sheet in her possession. there were also rules for exchange people pond cloth, or they wanted it back. they loaded if they did not in pawning people used clothing and other textiles is collateral against which they borrow a pain fees which was interest each week people charged with f actually would point out that they had pawned the goods which meant they didn't steal them because they could always get them back. they had not yet reduced them to their possession but loans were different with loans the owner expected the return of the textiles value plus interest not the goods themselves which declined in value and use over time. nobody wants the handkerchief that you just somebody else blew their nose and back. so the terms were then agreed to at the time of the loan verbally. and this is actually what sarah allenhan's case was all about the testimony that she had blown the testimony suggest that she had actually loaned the sheet to her neighbor sally riley not because riley was in desperate need of badlands, but because both women were leveraging the sheets value riley then sold it to rosanna marra, which was accepted practice and did not negate her obligation to repay the value of the sheet. it was only after alling him believe that riley had reneged of the loan that she took matters into her own hand and sees the sheet hoping to recruit some of her loss. then she went to court because it was never just about the sheet the rules of exchange really mattered those expectations of enforcement ran deep in kept local courts in both rural and urban areas very very busy. it is really remarkable that people without property rights felt confident in pursuing cases that looked an awful lot like assertions of property rights even more remarkable is responsive local officials who dutifully sorted through the evidence involving sheets shifts. tips shirts and shoes to figure out whose property was whose the legal qualities of textiles though only went so far and the book traces the trajectory of their use their eyes. they're used in decline and over time. people without property rights could not make claims through civil actions the usual means of reclaiming property through debt cases for instance because such suits required the possession of rights. even people with rights but on the legal margins because of racing class found civil actions difficult because they did not have the resources and the kinds of evidence necessary to produce to pursue them. so officials then shifted claims to prep to public law where they could be tried as criminal offenses. usually theft the point in this area of law was to write wrongs to put things back where they belong to make things right and that included sheets. so in this body of law court officials could act on complaints by people without the rights necessary in civil cases by treating these matters as things involving the public order, so they're a violation of the public order not a of their individual rights. matters involving claims to textiles also fit really well within this area of law because the legal principles that allowed everyone to owed and trade these goods we're so well established and established through practice as part of the public order. prosecution affirm those practices and restored the property to the places where they belong without recognizing the rights of the individuals involved now this provided some flexibility for people to make legal claims claims, but it also came with real costs the legal charge theft. was it convenience, but it made the very property claims of people without strong claims to property rights. it made all of those claims to property different and it made them also seem illegitimate. in fact, it criminalized them. somebody could own the property, but another person was declared a criminal the implications while ominous in the decades following the revolution would become inescapable as mid-century approached and the balance of legal author. to shifting towards those areas of law that focus more on the rights of individuals. now writes had definite advantages over textiles reclaims to textiles state in particular contexts with the people who knew about them the people who had testify about them the people who could show that they own them rightspace claims to property traveled freely with individuals had rights, they could claim property across all the mess of jurisdictional lines in the federal system within states from state to state from states to territories and pretty much in all bodies of laws. well, now this kind of portability mattered in a world where people moved and goods also flowed freely. in fact rights particularly property rights for this rare constant across all the jurisdictional lines of local state and federal. but that situation was challenging for merchants who were working across all of these jurisdictional lines, and it's so they needed some sort of constant that allowed them to to do business and in do this make sense similar kinds of claims across these church just from the lines, but the problems were awesome more fundamental here. so all of these laws all of these jurisdictions determined a person status and how they can move through the world. so people of african descent notably. we're presumed to be enslaved in some states and free and others. so this is a problem. no wonder then that the elimination of all of these restrictions and rights particularly property rights, we can key political issues for women for african americans the decades leading up to the civil war right to the things that allow people status also to have constancy across all this massive jur. the lines the problem though. is that the extension of rights did not allow for the kind of claims made with textiles nor did they eliminate the other legal restrictions that kept all women many african americans and even poor white men from claiming and using rights. textiles had given these people legal cover, but without them they were vulnerable. now to be sure the extension of rights helped. in fact, it was impossible to navigate either the legal order or the economy without them but the possession of rights only went so far as long as other kinds of restrictions remain in place. so by the late 19th century actually as the book argues many americans had little more than the close in their backs, but that property had become pretty flimsy legal coverings by that. and the people on the legal margins though, and this is i think really the point of the book did not just wait around for rights to be extended to them. they use the legal materials. they had at hand throughout the 19th century to work toward a world where claim their labor possess property and define their own destinies and those legal materials were literally the clothes on their backs. thank you very much laura edwards. our first discussion this afternoon is professor martha s jones, who is the society of black alumni presidential professor professor of history and a professor at the snf agora institute at the johns hopkins university. she is a legal and cultural historian. who's work examines. how blat americans have shaped the story of american democracy. professor jones is the author of vanguard. how black women broke barriers won the vote and insisted on a quality for all published in 2020 and was selected as one of times 100 must read for that year. she is also the author of the award-winning birthright citizens a history of race and rights in antebellum america published in 2018 all bound up together the woman questioned in african-american public culture 1830 to 1900 published in 2007, and she's co-editor of toward an intellectual history of black women published in 2015 prior to her academic career. she was a public interest to litigator in new york city, and she currently serves on the boards on the society of american historians national women's history museum the us capital historical society johns hopkins university, press the general of african-american history and slavery and abolition. professor jones martha welcome to the seminar screen is yours. thanks very much, eric. thank you to the washington history seminar and the aha in the wilson center for convening us today. and i want to start by saying very distinctly remember. when i said almost simultaneously to laura edwards and to making sweeney both that they had to meet one another they had to trade notes here were these two extraordinary scholars with such deep engagement and commitment to the craft and to the culture and to the everyday life of textiles even in their own lives. that means that this afternoon. i'm a bit of a happy interloper. i can barely thread a needle and i need to read the label to distinguish between rayon and silk. and still from both of you. i've learned so much about my own archives and the women who vomit who i have encountered there pilfering and thieving and secreting and snatching and otherwise claiming fabric and clothes that were not their own. if in local courthouses, these were women deemed petty thieves and on occasion actually not so petty. it was in conversation with laura edwards and through her work that has become this magnificent book only the clothes on her back that i was required to return to those archives and read them a new. so, thank you laura for the book for your mentorship and for your example. it has been truly transformative in my work. so when i say this book is much anticipated. well, that's an understatement i guess but many of us have been treated to parts of this work over the years at conferences and workshops and through comments on panels all of which suggested the degree to which this would be path breaking and so here we are to offer congratulations and some comment. one of the things that's remarkable about this book is the degree to which historians of capitalism of early america's many legalities along with historians of textiles trade the economic lives of women and more will be fascinated and changed by this study. laura edwards has brought her vast and field defining expertise on the quotidian and yet profoundly consequential dynamics of local legal culture into conversation with the far-reaching. even global dynamics that defined the production trade and the market of textiles and early america. these latter what in my work might be abstract matters on it might cause the eyes of cultural historians like me to glaze over but laura edwards of course has stories as you've already heard this afternoon one of the strengths of this work is it's insistence and it's deep capacity to bear out the claim that local people ordinary americans even those marginalized and formal law. we're connected to global markets and changed market forces in their own lives and by their own terms. it's a work that takes us back to dylan penningroth's important enduring claims of kinfolk. as i read this again. i remembered these are histories that take new and even unorthodox points of view that change our thinking no longer are ordinary people merely those buffeted about by capitalism's market forces their agents of law and lawmaking and while laura might see it. otherwise for me. this is the best of the approach to legal history pioneered by folks like dirk hartog and exemplified in his article pigs and positivism now many decades ago, the law was what people even ordinary people made it out to be. it was the contest that they waged the debates they weighed in on all that rather than the text alone is for us the history of law. one of the things i think readers might not anticipate is how this book is also an elegant primer in the history of fabrics and textiles. they're crafting production styling and more. such an insider's perspective could require a glossary in a less well-written book but here the value of textiles comes plain as we learn what it took to render them as articles of practical adornment. pretentious beauty and even class and status this foundation is what permits us to accept how such materials also became economic instruments currency capital and credit. any historian who has read a will or a state inventory has noted a family squabble over garments and fabric or like me marvel that how many cases on a 19th century local courthouse criminal docket mentioned the theft of textiles and clothes by someone who had no apparent use for them. finally has an answer to the questions these archives present. as laura edwards explains these items were property unlike any other and their value extended far beyond how they adorned oneself one's dependence or one's home textiles were property of a distinct sword so much so that even americans shunted to the margins of legal culture could claim their places and their property in court houses nearly uncanny success. this is a book of consequence for historians of law broadly be they scholars of latin america africa and asia. or those across many us subfields including african-american native american women's history. so many of us are at work on the intersection of ordinary people and global markets, and we see our archives in new through this work. i do have a sort of i don't know rambly questioned for laura edwards, and i'll try it here and hope we'll get to it in discussion and it really is about and laura you'll recognize this question because it's not the first time i've asked it of you about scale or the register of this work on the on the one hand. those of us who know your work are not surprised how you render this history as profoundly intimate right shaped by the rules and the logic that were local so that we see how ordinary people's engagements with markets that were far-flung actually played out on the ground in lives. and then the other hand there, is that other scale. this is a history that plays out on a world scale across europe across asia across the americas knit together by movements ocean season rivers, and i'm interested still in how you think about the choices of emphasis how you help us sort of stay steady as we're asked and you demand of us to think in these varied frames folks will encounter those references to india and china in the middle east that help us. i think to anchor those kinds of questions and for me only the clothes on her back enjoins with scholars who have importantly taken the history of women in textiles in particular beyond the history of labor beyond the history of fashion and adornment. to find at least political though. i think half-breaking here is finding not only the political but the legal meaning of those actions and transactions. i'm interested in intrigued by how native american historians will also find their way to and into this book, um, thinking about native americans own local legal cultures. yes, but the central role of textiles textile making fashioning and more in native american culture and they will figure here. so i think that's my time, but i do again want to say thank you to everybody for convenience. and especially thank you to laura edwards for this extraordinary book. it's really an honor to be here with you. thank you, martha. laura would you like to respond to that question that rather grand question that was just posed before we move on. sure sure. scale scale i had a really hard time with this book because on the one hand i started researching in the south thinking that a regional frame was the appropriate one and then it became very clear that region did not explain what i was looking for states did not explain what i was looking at actually and with this weird at least to me thinking at that time similarities between what was going on and like the new york city mayor's court in charleston, south carolina and south carolina up country and north carolina in pennsylvania, and it was strange to me because these were really very local jurisdictions that i was looking at, but the rules were operating when it came to textiles in a very similar way and i was like scratch in my head. i don't understand this and yet it became there when i started thinking about the global textile market and i started reading back in time and thinking about the way that in fact these goods have been moving across borders before there were even national borders right and that there's also real their legal principles that are developing relationship to the goods attach the goods and start to travel with them. so i had to really think outside our usual framework for understanding law right and policy. we usually think within a national framework and it was not the national framework that was operative here was actually a global market global trade in the principles that developed through them through those dynamics and then that spread to people that people picked up and used and so all of these legal principles kind of travel with the textiles themselves, but then they get out of root down and local areas people know them but to make them work it requires a lot of local knowledge. so you get the general principles, which is, you know, along the lines of the things that clothing attaches to you and if you have it you probably own it, but then in order at that you have to go very local because you know, which shirt belongs to which person is actually about a personal relationship to that particular item. so it is at once global and local and then part of the story is this development of the state law, but then kind of a national legal culture based on rights that circulates across all of these local jurisdictions that start to developing an intervening with all of this as well. so i'm trying to handle all of this scales at once and keep the focus, you know on the textiles, but as they move around through these jurisdictions as well. thank you very much before we move on just a reminder to those of you who are watching. you can participate as well. we have a number of people who have posed questions in the q&a function, but you could also use the raise hand function which has the advantage of i get to call on you and if you unmute you get to pose your question directly so you can start getting in the queue now if you so desire just an fyi. our second discussing this afternoon is megan sweeney the arthur f turnow associate professor of english afro-american and african studies and women's and gender studies at the university of michigan in ann arbor. she earned a ba in the history and literatures of religions from northwestern university and 1989 and a phd in literature from duke university in 2004. our publications include an award-winning monograph reading is my window books and the art of reading in women's prison published in 2010 and edited collection the story within us women prisoners reflect on reading 2012 and a collection of clothing related lyric essays called mendings, which is forthcoming from duke university, press in 2000 23 at the university of michigan megan sweeney currently serves as associate chair and as graduate studies in the women's and gender studies program as well as director of undergraduate studies in the department of english language and literature and as director of the hopwood program megan, welcome to the washington history seminar. thank you so much eric for that and i just want to say it's such an honor for me to participate in this conversation with both of you laura and martha, and i'm so grateful to have been brought together by this wonderful book. i remember when martha first told me about you laura and it's been so fun to dig into your work as you say about yourself and your acknowledgments. laura textiles have always distracted me too, and i want to begin by sharing two quick anecdotes that came to mind as i was reading only the clothes on her back. first in your acknowledgments you reference mulberry silks and carrboro, north carolina. i visited that shop about 35 years ago and keenly recall buying one yard of gorgeous fabric because that was all that i could afford but i was determined to design and sew a shirt with that amount. second when my husband and i got married many years ago my family gave us a spinning wheel and a loom as wedding gifts and we signed up for a spinning class while we were in graduate school, but ended up having to drop the class because the spinning was so difficult and we didn't have time to practice. i created some very lumpy strands that broke about every 30 seconds so i can attest to the considerable skill and dexterity and experience required for spinning and i want to say hats off to the many spinners you honor in your book. in terms of comments and questions about only the close on her back. i'd like to dwell for a minute on broader dimensions of the book that i especially admire and then get into some details with an observation and a few questions. throughout my reading i kept marveling at what a lucid compelling and lively account you offer of dense concepts and complex examples. i teach a course called threads what does clothing have to do with race culture politics and the environment and i'm so excited to incorporate more insights from your book into that course. i love your use of the weaving terms warp and weft to describe how people without strong claims to rights or property participated in constructing the country's legal fabric if we think of the warp as the laws that restricted most americans legal status and the weft as the textiles that people made legally meaningful. i love how you've organized each chapter around a particular historical case paired with a central concept such as currency credit or erasure those concepts provide such a helpful guide for readers. i love your manifest appreciation for the everyday textile artists confined to the margins of history and you're appreciation of their creations, which is evident when you describe for instance the rich details about preparing flax or fulling wool or when you rest on the bit of ribbon or lace that's in the story and i love the moments in which you dwell on the delightful language of the world. you conjure much of which is lost to us today. ali bally's carrie dairies do foodies gorgaons hums and iseries i love to your flashes of wit and humor throughout the book starting on the first page with your hopes that elizabeth billings donned more appropriate footwear for her attempted escape than the floral silk heals that she stole from her mistress. before i ask my questions, i'd like to share one connection that i made in reading that i was really struck by. you draw attention to the insidious ways in which women's household production was devalued as merely domestic labor and was artificially and erroneously separated from market-oriented production. this point reminded me of a wonderful documentary. called angry and nook created by aletheia arnacook buril in 2016 the film focuses on efforts to ban commercial seal hunting and those efforts have been absolutely devastating for inuit people in the canadian arctic inuit women process and prepare the skins for sale in their homes, but they're livelihood and the community survival is totally dependent on the commercial trade in seal skins. so women's textile related domestic work is part of the commercial market but the inuit are repeatedly told by activists that they are protected from negative effects of the ban by an exception that allows inuits to hunt seals for personal use the activists refusal to recognize the embracation of inuit women's domestic and commercial work struck me as a contemporary version of the illegible nature of some women's commercial textile work that you describe so beautifully in your book. my first question has a long windup. so please bear with me throughout your book you maintain a wonderful balance. i think between on the one hand recognizing the concrete social economic and legal inequalities that shape the daily lives of those without strong claims to rights or property and on the other hand illuminating the creative resourceful and often very moving ways. in which these ordinary people exercised agency in the midst of constraint in terms of concrete limits. you remind us that textiles under wrote the slave trade you emphasize as you've mentioned today that asserting property claims to textiles criminalized a huge range of property transactions as theft that it was a fragile and fleeting form of agency that was unequally available to those on the margins given race and gender restrictions, and then it did nothing to challenge the foundational racial gender and class inequities of the social order but at the same time your book highlights so many savvy important forms of quotidian agency including as one example the sutterfuge that people performed in accounting for time and labor that did not belong to them according to civil law either by committing nothing to writing or an example that i loved by tracking things in diaries or recipe books or commonplace books to prevent the property from being merged with a husband's property or an employer's property. and a second example you talk about how women's quilting circles and sewing circles and dress fittings. where as much about creating and maintaining property claims as they were about sociability or charity or the pulling of labor. your account also unsettles and challenges so many ideas that have long seemed like givens such as that married white women and enslaved people could not act as merchants or manufacturers or that people on society's margins could never expect or demand recourse to the law or that written codification of rights-based law represents unequivocal progress. and in unsettling these givens you vividly evoke realities that seem quite distant or even unimaginable today. such as in this is i think something that martha was invoking a concept of law as practice based in the customs of local communities and known widely by all as opposed to our concept of law as universal principles based in the rights of individuals, which write residing books and are is only available the trained few. if you emphasize the idea of local courts that had strong connections to the communities in which they were situated and that revolved around relationships. you emphasize the idea that public law incorporated those without rights and to its basic workings because they were part of the public body. you emphasize the idea that relationships a wee made it possible for individuals on the legal margins to act as an eye who could make claims to property. you emphasize the idea of commercial transactions as matters of relationship instead of distanced exchanges removed from social contexts. and you emphasize the idea that most people paid keen attention to the intimate details of clothing and thought of long-lasting well-made clothing as one of the most important forms of property investment. here finally is my question. so keeping in mind your admirable refusal to romanticize the past that you conjure. i'm wondering if in the course of your research you ever found glimmers of possibility or food for thought that seemed helpful for reimagining some of our current givens as a reader. i found it helpful and i dare say even hopeful. to be reminded of that ideas that now seem immutable and irrefutable are time bound and potentially ephemeral. so i found myself wondering what we might learn from the worlds you evoke in your book about contemporary possibilities for things like secondhand markets and exchanges or local economies and mutual aid or forms of local restorative even transformative justice or ways to rest clothing from its participation in exploitative labor practices and environmental devastation. so i'm wondering to what extent if any did you encounter ideas in your research that sparked your imagination about other ways that we might live in relation to clothing and also in relation to each other so very long and winding question, but but i hope it landed at a comprehensible place. right and i have one more question too. but if if it's helpful to go there first. sure, that that's that's a huge question megan and what my goodness yes, you this book is i found other people in this book. i really liked them and i found them. puzzling but i found them so incredibly admirable if they're creativity of the ways that they reimagined how they could work with the tools that they had and in this instance. it's these, you know, principles attached to textiles, but the textiles themselves they kind of reimagined who they were through their material where their relationship the relationship to these material goods and the ways that they could make these goods themselves too. it's it put not only legal agency but economic agency in their hands in a way that i found refreshing given the general presumptions that these people are kind of buffeted about by economic change and by you know the laws, country which simply exploited them and give them very little room from maneuver. what i found really fascinating was some of the things that you were pointing out with like the wii and i this idea that in fact you had to have a group of people who could support you that this was more important than this idea of an individual right for people who don't have power and so this book really made me think very clearly and kind of critically in ways that i hadn't before about the difference between power and rights. i think that right now we tend to presume that if you have right you have power and it was very clear from doing the research for this book that in this period that if you had rights, sometimes that wasn't really very useful because you didn't have the power to use them and in other instances, you know, you just didn't have rights, but you could have considerable power actually, so it made me separate these two things and textiles is the way of rethinking this right so that you know a wealthy woman who owned all kinds of clothing, but then all kinds of bed linens and textiles. she would have a group of people who knew that who could you know, actually attach those goods to her, but without that group of people those goods might move over into her husband's possessions because she was married to him coverture would place valuable property into the ambit of her husband's legal claims, but she needed that group of people around her to make sure that those that property stayed with her and this was even more important for enslaved women for instance, too, and i have a an example in the book polly who actually has a small business of our own spinning thread, but people see probably spinning the thread they see her dying the thread they know that it's her thread all of those people who know that about her they're able to help buttress her claims to this so it's not her right? it's the power that she has through those relationships and it's this creation. be that is really important. this is also important for mothers and daughters. so we've seen people have hope chests. i know this my mother had a hope chest actually my grandmother had a hope chest. hope chests are full of like bed linens and other kinds of textiles usually but i hope chest we imagine is oh, those are the kinds of just the things that women get when they get married and there's just, you know to help her set up the household and that's it. but actually this is a transfer of capital from mothers to daughters. so mothers who often control the labor of their daughters would allow the daughters to claim the fruits of their own labor what they produced in terms of textiles or sometimes what they made in other kinds of productive activities, but then purchase textiles they then took those put those textiles and trunks which actually are legal containers to the limit property. and then the daughters had capital that they could keep in the marriage. so this is not just consumer goods. this is actually capital that they have that can take a woman through difficult times and would be also removed from her husband's creditors. it's like, oh my gosh, this is actually a wee again of the mother the daughter and then people who know about this property creating secure claims to this really valuable form of capital. so it's interesting for me to think about power that way rather than right, but then think about power and creative ways to for today, right because we assume that rights will solve a whole range of problems in our society, but it may be that rights have less power to resolve those issues then this collective sense of these relationships we have to other people this sense of communal action of the ideas the public good and the power that you can get through exactly those kinds of relationships that we may have. too much in individuals and not seeing how all of this relationships and actually legal principles that attach to goods and that are created through those relationships how important those are. so that was a long-winded answer to your question, and i think there are other things in here too that i find really interesting like skill and the importance of skill and understanding value, but i'll leave it there and you ask your other question. megan back to you. wonderful. thank you. my second question has a much shorter windup, but it has two quick parts as a non-historian but in many ways i want to be historian. i found myself thinking a lot about method as i was reading your book and the first part of my question is given the many silences and gaps in the archive. i'd love to hear more about when and how you realized that you had a new different story to tell how did the story coalesce for you since so much of it goes against the grain of received wisdom? and the second part is i'd love to hear more about how you taught yourself to read. the extant materials many of which require very different kinds of literacy. i'm thinking for instance of how elizabeth bagby recorded as memoranda the transactions related to textiles that she actually produced and traded. or how rebecca kate recorded her her own work as a wife who did uncompensated domestic labor and also the wage work performed by her unmarried sister. how did you acquire the literacy for parsing these practices for what they were given how little they have been visible in the record of explanation. yeah, so elizabeth bagby for everybody else who hasn't read the book elizabeth. bagby has a memorandum book. actually. it's it's called a memorandum book. it's called a commonplace book in the archives. it's not really a commonplace book. it's just what it's labeled and she has all of her weaving accounts in this book and at the beginning though, she has a quote and i'm gonna forget the exact quote but it's basically for all the goods that belong to the household. you must keep careful account, but for the goods cheaper to produce within yourself, and essentially the goods are belong to her. it's best to keep memoranda, and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that for i don't know several years and then i was like, oh my gosh, she's actually talking about household accounts the goods that she produces as a wife under curvature that belonged to her husband and their creditors and then the memoranda is a way of separating out her goods and so you have account books and you have accounts because i've been looking at account books and puzzling over when women appear when they don't appear when enslave people appear when they don't appear. and it occurred to me. it's like oh those are legal records. nobody uses account books in this period to like track economic production or figure out you know, how to better your business. it is a legal record to determine who's in debt to you and who's not and how much they owe so women don't appear in there because it's a legal form where it's unnecessary generally for married women to appear or enslave people to appear because you can't sue them in civil court, which is where like account looks matter. memoranda is something else you take it in a different form. it looks different the material qualities of it are different. and so that's a memorandum. it's not an account, which means that you've separated out your property and that the memoranda establishes your connection to it, but it doesn't give creditors your husband or their creditors any claim to that. and so, you know, i don't know it's these moments where you have this tension where something doesn't make sense and it's those weird sentences and that was one of them. it's like best to keep memoranda. what does that mean and then all of a sudden we sort of when the context of the larger like account book universe it starts making more sense and then once you get that little kind of clue there just like oh then the whole chapter starts unfolding or several those chapters starting unfolding with looking at how people do track their accounts and they attract accounts verbally, which have a different kind of legal resonance. they attract counts through the material goods themselves people would bring in for instance if you accused of stealing address and then bring in the dress and say see, i didn't steal it like why would you do that? that's not very like credible evidence to me. you could still bring in the stolen dress, right? but this is all part of a logic whereby if you are claiming like your connection to it you're showing your connection to a material good then that's a way of showing that you in fact do own it and have legal claim to it. you would never bring in something that you had dolan that you don't have legal claim to because you would be hiding it and you would have actually like put it into the secondary market and got rid of it as fast as possible right to have claimed it to have kept it and then to wear it shows that you actually have this legal claim to it. so you have to start then piecing together the pieces of evidence that don't make sense and then try to like create the pattern. so i just feel like this is a puzzle and you get little pieces of the puzzle and it's gonna put this down. this is a corner piece. i think oh it is a corner piece then all the sudden other things start taking shape and with this it was really like seeing a world that i couldn't i didn't notice there and i found it really kind of exciting to piece together for instance the accounting and the ways that people are trying to hide their whole economic world because if they put it in writing and put it in certain forms, it's going to move into the hands of their masters their employers. and their fathers and i found this particularly compelling with enslaved people who are constantly hiding the forms of accounting and yet constantly depending on all of this relationships that people seeing their goods. so it's utterly public and yet we can no longer see it as historians because the evidence was kept in a way that is not saved and not visible and for a reason right so we have all of the written evidence of the economic world of the men with property who could work in civil law because that is in writing and it was saved in particular kinds of forms that now in archives and so we think that's the only thing and yet there's this whole other world out there that was documented in very different ways and we don't see that anymore to me that gets back to your first question too. it's like there are there's a whole world there that we're unaware of that we could still draw on because the possibilities to imagine economic exchange power people's relationships a lot. it's much broader in our past than what we had assumed. thank you. it's wonderful. thank you. we're now going to open this up to those in the audience. we have a hand patiently waiting to be called upon sonia michelle, you know the routine please unmute. join the conversation thank you, eric. and thank you very much laura for what sounds like a fascinating book. i ordered it while you were talking. i am. sorry. i missed the first few minutes, but um, i ordered it as soon as i heard you're talking about it. um, first of all, just let me start with a little anecdote perhaps you read in the new york times last week. there was an article about the ukrainian air force and there was one line that struck me where they described the wife of one of the pilots and he said and the article said she spends her days weaving homemade camouflage nets for the ukrainian army. that phrase was just so incredibly evocative. i don't know if you know i've abandoned history and i'm now become an artist and i immediately started working on a collage that to that evoke to me what it what the camouflage that's must look like these homemade camouflage nuts, but i do have a question or a sort of serious question. um, and i'm sorry, i didn't hear the sort of a whole overview of your book. so maybe you've already touched on this but what is the relationship between i mean throughout the 19th century what? production weaving and so forth was becoming increasingly industrialized and i wonder if that's a thread or a theme through the book and if so how that relates to this but obviously seems to be another focus of yours. that is the the individual and handmade production of textiles and then sort of going in a somewhat different direction what i was doing the wash this morning and i was thinking about laundry. what is the relationship between laundry textile production on and laundry on the one hand and textile production and women's dress making and tailoring on the other and the sort of gendering of all of those activities. i wonder if you talk about all of that in the book. and yeah, so let me do laundry first. i'd like laundering is how you rehabilitate textiles. so in laundry is really important because as actually megan i believe was saying it's a having well made. fitted clothes that are well-kept. it's like this is really important to people this is not just sort of like poor people do this because it's really meaningful to them. they're not doing it simply to you know, like to try to aspire to middle class values or anything. this is this is something that is incredibly important because it is supposed to clothing represent your inner self. and is your your inner self is expressed through your outer layers. and so this is about, you know, making a statement about your character and it is seen as really important to like tend to that and so it's not just a matter of having expensive clothing. it's a matter of keeping it up and making sure it's well fitted and well-tended and so laundry is a part of that and poor people go to extraordinary links to wander. listen to have white and then in a particular caffeine brown is written about this. john stiles is written about this. but laundering is also about adding value right? so if you think about the the metaphors and the imagery here, it's like money laundering you make it clean, but you can make clothing clean and you launder it and you turn it into a better version of itself. you're adding value that way and i found it really fascinating to think about the production of clothing laundering but also all the kinds of mending and then remaking of clothes that people do they're constantly adding value to this stuff and so it's not just making it prettier. it is in fact, you know turning making this into a more valuable item and then that's part of adding value and like exchanging it and turning into currency as well. so i feel like people are kind of printing money in some ways when they're doing this and that part we've never really kind of considered i find that to be fascinating so the industrialization part you know, that's the storyline is that that i was raised on and that i think it's still kind of central to the literature. is that the early 19th century you get the mechanization of cotton production and weaving and spinning you get the low mills and then it all is basically industrialized in the focus on is on people who work in the mill. so the presumption that basically mechanization is taking over the whole situation here when textile production but then i started looking in and it's actually way more complicated than that. so textiles are unevenly mechanized. so cotton is mechanized wool is much harder to mechanize although it is mechanized faster linen isn't really mechanized until in the late 19th or the 20th century and silk is also the weaving of it becomes mechanized but still the making of silk is actually really difficult in the weaving of it is is difficult to it's more moderately mechanized. so the other so there are all sorts of spaces. economy for hand labor, especially within in production with wool. the best wool is still done by hand in cotton production is also a lot of really fine cons. you're still done by him because the stuff that machines do isn't that great at first and then the more stuff you produce the more opportunities the art of fashion it into clothing which actually produces more hand labor and so you'll find a lot of hand labor like in the delaware river valley for instance that is growing up alongside factory labor, and this gets to that, you know, skills and value and even then if you're working in a factory skills still matter, so it's not like you just anybody can walk in there and do it, although somehow we tend to presume that and the same way that we kind of resume anybody so stuff right all when they could do that. it's like no it's actually takes a lot of skill and like really good class if it's well done. that's what makes it commercially viable. so, you know and before mechanization basically all cloth is done in the household and what distinguishes you know homespun from commercial cloth is the quality. and the quality is not something that is determined by gender women reduce quality or people can produce quality. it's protect it has nothing to do with race either it has to do with somebody's skills so women and you know enslave people free blacks all these people are concentrating oftentimes in textile hand production and also mechanized textile production, too, but textile hand production because they can basically create value with their hands, but they can also keep the value with their hands. and so i find this to be really important right? we've missed this key part of the whole explanation as to why these things are gendered, but i would argue also raised to because in fact out of all the things that you can produce out of all of your very bad options if you are a woman a poor person or a person of color in this period textile production actually provides you a way to keep at least some of what you produce and legally and this is really important. so for instance, have these letters that were in duke university. manuscripts archives and they're from women who in 1840s were working low mills. they turn all of their wages into fabric. and i find this fascinating right so they buy fabric they can buy it in low, and it's a good deal relative to where they live. they then go home and sell it and there's all this correspondence back and forth between the sisters. it's like don't tell people how much it costs at all because they want to charge more back at home. right and then they have all this other kinds of, you know directives as an i'm sending you, you know this large cut of long cut of coffee. don't cut it up. don't cut it up to sell it that will devalue it and so they're very aware here of what kinds of goods they can produce but then i'll also what kinds of value they can claim all of those women are actually unmarried but the connection of women in textiles is so close that you know, the idea that if you're a woman textiles textiles is the thing you do and you trade in that has become really ingrained by that point. so yeah, i think that piece of it is really important for understanding industrialization, but then also seeing industrialization actually increases the spaces and opportunities for skilled and labor to thank you. michael. novak. you've got a hand up, please join us. can you hear me? yes we can. okay. good afternoon. thank you for being here. my question is your talking a lot about the about the manufacturing of cloth and textiles and how it relates to people's role in the law in the economy. i was wondering if this is if this is in relating anyway if you've looked into the making of shoes and if that was similar if there was it was totally different. i don't know if you've looked at that. i'm just curious if you have if you found anything interesting. yeah, i don't actually look into the making of shoes but people claim shoes that kind of include shoes in the textile rubric which i find fascinating like i think this relates to some of martha was talking about these people are really they're very creative and it's like textiles and clothing belongs to me that handkerchiefs belong to me too and hats oh and scarves and shoes too. so, you know, basically after certain point is like well it has something to do with textiles feathers are for hats right if it passes through my hands i own it. so it's not just the clothing you wear. it's all this other stuff and so all the accessories get included in or people try to include them in and they're fairly successful in doing so although not always right so they include all those in there and so that's kind of why i have this people always ask me what are textiles. it's like, well basically it's a legal category. it's all the goods that you can include within this category in this category sort of extends out to include shoes. there is one great case with this where there's an enslaved man if you has a solid business dealing in dry goods to other encycloped people in his community and he is accused of stealing shoes. i think this also gets back to this question of i and we and so what he does is he brings out all of the enslaved customers who shop with him essentially and he has a store in it's a store of goods not an actual physical place and so he brings out all of these witnesses who one lines up and says, no the shoes that you say we're stolen he didn't have them because the shoes he was selling those shoes are really poor quality and i was looking for like better shoes. so, you know, he's saying no those weren't the shoes he had, you know, we have another person line up and say no. no, there's something else going on here. there was actually a fight about so this as they're all testifying about the goods of this man has and the fact that he has goods and is selling to other enslaved people as a way than of saying that no, he didn't actually steal the goods. it's really name because in fact they all could have been arrested for like, you know, he could be arrested for for dealing goods with enslaved people. he's not supposed to be selling but all of that became evidence of the fact that he didn't steal the shoes in question because other people saw him with a whole different array of goods, but not the shoes. so again, it was the way that he was dealing all the people surrounding him within able to ultimately save him from that theft charge and it was also interesting that the mattresses didn't really care that he was like selling shoes and other dry goods in the secondary market they were more concerned with theft, but the presumption was he could make some sort of legal claims to those goods and in fact so much so that he could even engage in selling them. so thank you up next to leon fink and then if ursula rack could stand by we'll call on you after leon. hey laura. hey leon, but here this account of what i'm sure is gonna is a great book. leon i think we've lost you. i was intrigued by your response to sonia michelle's. hello. hello, can you hear me on yes? can you hear me so we can okay. i don't know what the problem is up. in any case i was interested in the relationship laura between the world that you're describing of basically home-based textile production and industrial world of production that we're more familiar with at least as labor historians are and i was in interested in your suggestion that there's maybe an interaction between these two worlds, but one distinction seems to be that at least the is in the methods of attending to grievances in your world. it seems to be an individual and legal arena and the more industrial centers. it is a history. um, you know from through amusky through the southern mills seems to be a more collective of form of address. could you comment on that distinction and what you think might be the interactions and you think there's a whole world of labor history that might for example among even among industrial textile workers who might at the same time be involved not only in home production, but also in legal complaints that were we haven't really examined yet. yeah, you know, i was really struck. i mean i was like i said raised on that distinction between you have to household production you have the industrial production and yet a lot of the work in textile and textile history is blurring all those distinctions by pushing at least commercialization, but also the transformation of labor relations not just the commercialization back in time and putting that actually within households. so you have putting out system. you have the breakup of of independent producers and having them glumped under you know, somebody who's a merchant who's then organizing production? and skimming, you know from the top of basically they become wage workers but working in their households and often relying on household labor of women and children. so all that is happening within households, but then those people sort of move into industry into into factories, but that transition i don't think this is abrupt as what we've imagined and some of the people who are coming to the united states are like, you know, they're they're refugees from the linen industry in the british isles and the woolen industry too in the british isles. and so they're trying to get away from that system, but they're also relying on the skills then to set up shop in their own homes and often the women are the ones who are taking over that kind of labor, but then it's an easy sort of transition into some of these factory settings where it's not quite as abrupt as you see in cotton so you would have wool factories where you might be working in the factory, but you're kind of doing the same thing you'll be doing at home and some will factories are actually putting out systems. so a seth rogmans work is really interesting in this regard, but then i think your question about communal approaches that i think you're getting the wrong impression if you think i'm saying that these are individual and individualistic claims. i mean, that would be the kind of the the gloss that civil outlets on this where your frame the legal framework cashew as an individual with rights you then makes claims against another individual this is taking place in even then actually a lot of and i'm hoping the book like underscourses even then that's a legal frame and in fact all of that depends on a whole bunch of evidence that is involved with it depends on other people knowing about your property claims and be able to come and justify that and support you and all of that. so there's usually a community behind any sort of legal claim to property but then if you look at the public side that i'm talking about where people are making claims to property without rights you come in with your whole crew. sarah allingham did it actually is what sarah alham didn't do. it's what roseanna marra did so she comes in with her she and her witnesses and all these people come in and you've got to have all those folks and so there is a sense of community and collaboration in there of understanding what certain you know, a principles are in your community what sort of practices are accepted and then it's a constant effort of enforcement which involves a whole range of people and if you think about it, that's not so different from what's going on mills where like you have certain expectations about workplace practices about value of your labor about the relationships. you have at the people who are employing you and then there's collective action around that you're just going to get more collective action because you're all alone together in that factory, right? but you find the same kinds of expectations with the enforcement of the practices surrounding the exchange and ownership of excels generally, so i don't think they're as dissimilar. actually. i think there's overlap there. and i think that the framework as i said earlier like the right space framework. it's a legal framework and to mistake that with how things actually work is to like mix those things up. i mean the legal framework is not social how so people think about property. it's how the legal framework handles that and people slot their issues into that framework. and sometimes that framework is really important in the way that people start imagining things, but it's entirely different from the way people actually operate oftentimes. thank you ursula rack. you've been patiently waiting, please join us if you unmute. hello, good morning from new zealand. i'm a historian myself, and i was wondering what how was it with mains clothing, especially when they were younger and you know sons but what happened for example with the clothes when they have spent a father or yeah, the the owner of the woman died. how was that working was the clothes from the main also then in the position of the women or was only women's clothes and peddling and so on her property. thank you. so yeah, the clothes that belong to the person belong to the person so it's kind of it's not presumed then that the like a husband's clothes with them move to the wife and people are very particular about their clothes. so, you know like men are really particular about their clothes too and their wives are not their wives will like and this is kind of well established in scholarship that i did not do that wives are responsible for linens. basically, but men are like their coats and their pants they go off and do that themselves and i have a group of women coulee women who have in western virginia. you have a whole business and they they sell they be they do a bunch of different kinds of things all in textile production, but one of the sort of key customer bases is men who want really fancy coats from militia masters, and this is a thing so you have a uniform which is not actually uniform it is a uniform but there's nothing uniform about it. i also think that's kind of fascinating actually, so they all come with sort of the same style but different colors they want braids and they want epileps and they want, you know buckets and they need little trimmings over here. and so they do this, you know, they do the coats and the guys are really picky about what it looks like and they come in for fittings. just great. so there is this attachment of people to you know, the clothes that they wear that way and so within families, yes, it's it's the in the children's clothes are there's the wives closer there's and then the other textiles that they're able to kind of account for in their community in the community knows that they're theirs so there's this concert sort of sorting around that way but yes, the men's clothes don't automatically go to the wife the wife does not automatically own everything that's in the household it is she has to establish those claims just to work really hard to establish those clients. thank you. we have a question in the q&a her hand also went up but then it went down. so at least i have the question and i will pose it on behalf of kyra haynes who writes as someone who is doing their senior thesis on victorian fashion. could you talk about your research process and what it was like and what sources you relied upon for your research? so this is where i martha has. like listen to me talk about this research forever and ever and the research process was was long and arduous. i feel like i was doing this when i didn't know i was doing it so i started kind of like collecting stuff about textiles when i was doing my dissertation with him nothing to do with textiles. i just got distracted by it. so i've been collecting this for a very long time and i didn't really see how that off it together until or how i was gonna fit together until recently, but i've looked at court cases local court cases. i've looked at federal court cases. i think it's state court cases. i've looked at account books. i've looked at correspondence about clothing. this is not the kind of book that i looked at the material artifacts themselves. and so this is not really the kind of book that i could have done. early in my career. i think it's three. you're very privileged you accumulate things over time and in you're and this is definitely one of those if i had just and i actually had a crisis of conscience and faith or i don't know method maybe would be a better way to put it when i was doing footnotes for an article recently and they said i cited a collection of court cases and they said no we need specific court cases that prove this point and the point i was making was about the legal qualities of trunks. so trunks are legal container for people who don't own their own houses. and so i had tons of cases on trunks hundreds of cases and trunks and i didn't know what trunks meant and then one day it occurred to me as i was looking at the hundreds of cases of trunks cases on trucks that that people were referring to trunks as a way to demarcate the property is theirs and it had definitely legal qualities and in fact you search warrants for trunks for instance. so i was stuck because i'm like am i supposed to cite the several hundred cases on trunks that i have because if you look at any one case you don't see the point it would just refer to a trunk and you would walk by that case like i had walked by those cases. it was just that i happened to make notes about trunks because i don't know i was like doing something verbatim, you know like transcription of the court record. so i didn't know what to do exactly because this is through practice and it's through repetition of these things. and so this gets looking to megan's question about method. it's like you have to look at this for a very long time and you have to look at it over and over and over and over and this is us that i think what you know, martha's comment too is about it's like this is about practice the way that it becomes law is if you do it over and over and over and over so it makes it really difficult to explain citations to folks because they're expecting the court case that establishes the principle and there's no one court case that does that in this instance. it's just the repetition and so you kind of have to hang in there long enough to get the repetition in persistent. so this works, but that's kind of difficult if you're like doing a senior thesis for instance. you don't have the time to do that. but if you could just elaborate a little bit more so you've had many years of experience with these records and the issues that you're dealing with. and so this is in the back of your mind it stays there and that allows you to see eventually things that you didn't see before, but you said terrific phrase seeing a world that i didn't know was there and i just i'd love that that phrasing but as a legal historian who is interested both in the law, but in the real people and the social relations that the law can help illuminate, it's safe to say that you're diving into the world of legal cases allows you to recreate that kind of broader social world and the dynamic and the relationships between people so these cases are about more than principle and outcomes, but they do allow you to see and then reconstitute this world that you didn't know was there. yeah, and it's like it's it's true. yes, and it's true. but if you look at like local court cases and martha feel free to lay in here on local court cases. so you get little fragments. it's like i have a paragraph and it will say, you know, so until ellen stoled something out of sue's trunk. and sue said it was in her. she hadn't closed the lid and i'm like, what is this about so you have them another case? it's about a you know, somebody else told something that's a list of stuff from a truck and you get another little phrase. you don't get much though. so it is about the repetition and so like for instance with trunks i realized you repetition that you keep the lid open then you've not reduced. what's in the trunk to your possession. this is important if you are enslaved or servant in a house because you could be accused of stealing something of your masters and mistresses is found in the trunk, but then you say the lid was open so you hadn't reduced it to your possession if you close the lid then you're in you're in like territory there where you you've claim the goods as your own because you've closed the lid. still gray though because you just closed it. you could open it back up which means that your master and mistress could come back in and then take whatever it is that they're accused of stealing out of the trunk if you close the lid and lock it then you've reduced this to your possession because you've made it so that is a container that nobody else can get into? understanding that though took me like hundreds of cases to figure it out. right? so and there's no one case that says ha the principle of the open trunk lid and so it is those legal cases the local cases in particular. are you just have to handle them differently than you would like a state or federal case where there are dealing with the principle of law and the point is to state that and here they're like, they're not and they're they're hiding this from kind of martha you could weigh in on this too. i think just push us a little bit, you know to say that you know what i think i've learned from you, but i don't want to speak for you. but what i've what i've taken from your work is the mistake we make is thinking that what law is is text that law is doctrine that laws the constitution that law is the common law as it is articulated and iterated over time. that is not law that law is requires for historians. yes and understanding of the text but ultimately the history of law is what people do with the text and how people in their practices produce the text and that is so it's to say that the distinction as if somehow there's law and then sort of mixing with laws something like i don't know social or cultural political history is sort of misses. i think the intervention because the intervention is to say that's a false distinction and that actually the history of law is the history of how parties people societies and more make meaning and how meaning changes over time how meaning is produced over time. so maybe i've overstated it laura, but that's a way to just sort of force the point i guess. yeah. thanks martha that just thank you. and yes and part of the point of this book too is to show kind of changes in that over time because we kind of take the institutional history of courts for granted. we kind of assume that there is this thing law it works in a certain way and you know, you got the higher court you got the lower courts, and it's always like that and part of this is to mess with people's heads about this to change our understanding of this history and so like a whole chapter on overlapping jurisdictions and overlapping bodies of law in the you know, the decades following the revolution and so it's even more important in the late 18th and early 19th century in the united states where they're different jurisdictions where they're different bodies of law where there is less coordination of all of that and so there is also a real sense that you can create principles to practice and so as martha was saying it's not that this practice and somehow then we have law over here. it's that the principles you can see and create through the practice and those principles have as much kind of legal traction as what is in a written text and over the course of this period though. you also do see that certain elements of written texts acquire more attraction and more power and authority within the legal system and those tend to be about right space laws based where you get more about procedure. so for instance in local court cases with all the women who bring in their textiles and say look i know and i bought it here and i did this and i'm wearing it and you understand all of that starts giving way to more procedural-based cases or cases based and procedural rights. so the questions would be more about well, you know was the door locked or not because that would be about whether it's breaking and entering or whether they're just entered and you get this more sort of formalized right space system that starts 15 a lot of these local cases and the written law and particular kinds of written laws that are taught in law schools that are then elevated in this period as being the primary source of law that's part of the, you know, the developments that are happening as well. so, you know, the reason why we go there is because of this period where that kind of law acquires more meaning and authority and it starts taking it more space and people start arguing that the written texts are actually really more important than the practices themselves and we've forgotten then that those practices used to have real legal traction and they still do in a lot of ways because even to this day, you know brown people to education is a great example. it's about practice people are constantly in supreme court cases talking about us supreme court case is talking about practice history. what used to be originalism is in fact about you know this idea about what the practices actually were in the past, so we still also give practice a lot of space and law and we don't always i think recognize that but we don't see the real space it had in the 19th century and we don't see it as creating law in the way that it did in that period thank you. you tell many stories. in the book the very diverse set of characters you end the book with perhaps the best-known name of mary todd lincoln if you could just say just a few words about that example and what it reveals and how and why you end the book with her experience. yeah. it was a revelation for me that mary todd lincoln produced a national crisis by trying to sell her clothes that she wore while she was, you know, the president. i'm like, wow, so this to me is this example of how clothing loses it's legal valence and becomes more like simply a consumer item and if it's a consumer item that is simply your second skin and especially in the post emancipation period to sell your second skin is akin to selling yourself and this is the way that then you know merit i think is just completely ridicule than the national press for she's such bad page. she's selling herself. herself. she's like a prostitute. and in fact always sold their clothes. this was their capital. this is what they have entire secondhand clothing store set up. i most main streets in america to handle exactly this kind of thing. and yeah it is cast in a very different way as a consumer good not something that is legally legible and legally important for people to do and the real important part of this as well. is that caught in the midst of all of this is a list of calculate. he was married totally consumede and she has an entire business set up which is not just being a seamstress but it is designing and fashioning clothing and making it for you know, washington's easily women so her carefully design garments are then held up ridicule by the entire country and then basically all of the labor and the skill that was brought into that is also erased as these goods become simply consumer goods. why don't you sell your old clothes just go buy new ones who has old clothes anyway, and she never recovered. luckily, she didn't get her business back. it was just erasure of her her skill and also the legal asked the legal qualities of clothing too that you know made them actually forms the currency in capital that women sold all the time and the poor people encycloped people had sold all the time and so it is this really sad. i need to the story too because you know, this is supposed to emancipation period this is when we're going to enact the 14th amendment. nobody gets rid of coverture at that point married on this property acts do not get rid of coventure and elizabeth keckley is going to be in a very different position than african-american men in this period and then even then african american men. well they do is like dylan penningross new book is going to be about all this. there's still is a lot of ability for african americans to claim property, but we've not fully considered the ways that men and women's relationship to property is very different based on the different trajectory of the extension of rights, but then also the erasure of these other ways of claiming property and megan this may get back to your point as well is that we're so accustomed to thinking this property is an individual possession that we also can't imagine different ways of owning using regulating property that it could be for the public good that it could be about communities of people that they're different ways and they're different ways of making claims on the productive capacity of that property to beyond simply those of individuals and absolute ownership that we imagine today. so thank you. i unfortunately have to draw this to a close because our designated time is up, but i do want to express my sincere. thanks to laura marthamy name i. i'm a professor of american religious history at yale university and it's my privilege to serve as moderator for this panel today. this session asks how national state and local governments have sought to manage religious diversity throughout american history. together these panelists tell a story of how us state actors working within seemingly secular realms like us military governance health care and taxation created an unstated religious policy that defined some religions as marginal.

Transcripts For CSPAN3 Laura Edwards Only The Clothes On Her Back 20220731

the hidden history of power in the 19th century united states published by oxford university, press in late, february and joining us this afternoon as discussions are martha jones of john's hopkins and megan sweeney of the university of michigan. i'm eric arneson from the george washington university co-chair of the washington history seminar along with my colleague christian osterman of the wilson center who cannot be here today. the washington industry seminar is a collaborative non-partisan venture of the woodrow wilson center's history and public policy program and the american historical associations national history center. and for over the past decade the seminar has bee been meeting wey and pre-covid times in person at the wilson center and since the pandemic well, here in the virtual realm behind the scenes two people make these seminars possible pete bierstecker of the wilson center and rachel wheatley of the national history center, and i'd like to thank institutional supporters the george washington university department of history in particular as well as a number of anonymous individual donors. and as i say every week, we invite you to join their ranks. on the logistics front, please note. today's session is being recorded and can soon be found on our institutions respective websites and crucially when we get to the question and answer section of the webinar, we ask those with questions to use the raise hand function on zoom or the q&a function not chat and to those watching on facebook live. you can email questions to rachel wheatley at our weekly our wh e a t l e y at historians.org, and we will call on as many folks as we can we prefer for you to raise hand and pose the question yourself. otherwise, i have to pose it for you. all right with that it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker this afternoon laura edwards, who is the class of 1921 bicentennial professor in the history of american law and liberty in history department at princeton university. her work focuses on the legal history of the 19th century united states with an emphasis on people's interactions with the law and the legal system. she's the author of a number of books a legal history of the civil war and reconstruction a nation of rights published in 2015, and the people and their peace legal culture and the transformation of inequality in the post-revolutionary south 2000. nine a book that was awarded the american historical associations littleton griswold prize for the best book and law in society and the southern historical associations charles sydney price for the best book in southern history. she's received fellowship from the newberry library the national humanity center national endowment for the humanities the acls the bogan high foundation and the american bar foundation. and today we're delighted that she's here speaking about her most recent book only the clothes on her back clothing and the hidden history of power in the 19th century united states. laura the screen is all yours. welcome. to the washington history seminar thank you so much for having me and thank you for the lovely introduction and thank you to megan and martha for coming today as well. so i'm gonna start with a story because the book is full of stories. so i'm gonna begin with six women in a sheet. so all of these women and the sheet appeared in new york city's municipal court in 1804, and actually it was the sheet that started at all which is apropos because this book is about a textiles. so one of the women sarah allingham charged another woman judith friel was stealing the sheet. although these charges really that's the oversimplified this whole situation. so judith frio was a washer woman who just happened to have the sheet amongst the dirty laundry. she was collecting that day. so imagine her consternation where sarah ellingham ran out into the street way later grabbed up her bundles and began rummaging through them and the city streets loudly actually remington three of them. so when allingham found which she insisted was hershey she announced her discovery and marched off with it to file charges in the new york. city's mayor's court and judicial was following in her way. so once in court, it became clear that judith friel was in fact really transporting that she to her house to be washed. it was another woman sally riley who had taken it nearly a year earlier. so riley had been sold it to rosanna morara. this is getting confusing who's bundle of laundry was the one that contained the sheet so both of those women joined the other two making four women and a sheet in court then two more women appeared as witnesses to support roseanna moraris claims that she had purchased a sheep from sally riley bringing us to six women and a sheep. so ultimately the court listen to all this they awarded the sheet to rose anniversara. so case closed but actually not really robert given conventional historical wisdom. this dispute never really should have made it to court at all. these were poor women. they're squabbling over a cheap sheet and more to the point. they were married women encumbered by coverture. a collection of legal principles limited wives legal rights and subordinated them to their husbands among other things coverage of prohibited women from owning property and prosecuting court cases in their own name more than that covered sugar gave husband's legal rights to property in their wives and property that their wives bought into marriage and anything that they acquired afterward by those rules. sarah allingham could not own a she let alone prosecutor case to claim ownership. yet and sarah allenham's case officials accepted both the women's claims two property and their access to the legal system. they did ultimately give a nod to coverture's rules. they identified the prosecutor as allen hans husband attributing ownership of the sheet to him, but after filling in the obligatory boxes officials dispense with this fiction that the matter at anything due to the husbands. in fact, they were not in court at all for the court officials as well as the women involve. the question was which married woman possessed the sheet not whether a married woman could possess it. now to make things more interesting here this case was not at all unusual between the revolution and the civil war courts the united states regularly dealt with similar cases cases involving claims by people on the legal margins often people without property rights at all to clothing related accessories such as hats and handkerchiefs as well as uncut cloth and bed linens. so how could people without property rights claim property? and that is the question that i explore in this book only the closer back. the answers i argue lie in the legal qualities that attach to clothing so people without property rights including married women and enslaved people relied on long-standing legal principles. that attach clothing to the person who wore it, but they did not stop there through use. they expanded those legal principles to make legal claims to all kinds of textiles and accessories that they made or that simply passed you their hands because it was textiles and something related to cloth they could keep this they could make legal claims to it and then they went further using the security provided by law to turn these goods into currency into capital and collateral for credit which gave them an entry point into governing institutions and the economy. people like sarah allen ham. we're not on the outside looking in as we have usually assumed they actually use textiles to include themselves in governing institutions and the economy and they really made law this way insisting on the recognition of commonly held legal principles that unlike property rights app. broadly to everyone so the first of our sarah ellington's she was not really that unusual once you start looking for textiles you realize that they're everywhere people made them. they sold them they talked about them. they thought about them all the time yet scholars from period period between the revolution and the civil war have tended to kind of walk by such property and assume that it was more like consumer goods and instead focus on the kind of property land enslaved property commodities owned by elite white men the minority of the population the textiles in this period were not just consumer goods. they too were valuable property and valuable property that unlike other forms of property. most americans could legally own. so by the time of the revolution the accountant the economics of textiles had hit really kind of a sweet spot would have been luxury goods before we're now more affordable and more available and not so cheap is to be completely worthless quality mattered and people knew quality broad range of americans including the -- and slave could spot find linens silk wool at 10 paces and they could assess trimming such as ribbon and bridge just as accurately and that knowledge was i'm prominent display in theft cases across the united states parties to these cases were describe coughing clothing in great detail distinguishing cheap goods from expensive ones and rattling up information about fiber content colors and patterns that most people today would never notice let alone remember and all the details function like figures on a banknote actually in fact textiles were preferable to things notes for most for many americans. the possession of banknotes was suspect for poor people and people without property rights. the presumption was that they should not have them and so if they did it was suspicious but not so with the possession of textiles because the legal principles of associated with them gave people claims to them textiles also had economic advantages over banknotes because they actually held their value more reliably the material qualities of textiles suited them for use this currency as well. there was considerable consensus as to their value. they were extremely liquid and they came in different denominations, which was handy. they ran the gamut from handkerchiefs, which you could used by small things and big expensive links of cloth, which you could use to buy more expensive things. when people traded in these goods, they were not bartering they valued items and pounds or dollars and then bought and sold accordingly and leverage the value of textiles as people did with other property pawning them lending them or saving them to fund future ventures. the result was this vast secondary market, which provided not just access to goods, but also a means to circulate them. so this part of the market was kind of everywhere and nowhere in particular it included palm brookers auctioneers pedalers grocers tavern keepers tailors dressmakers unlicensed shotkeepers vendors and open air markets as well as individuals who just sold on the streets and from their homes. and to say that this market was underground or informal actually misconstrues, its institutional underpinnings, which depended on widely recognized enforced rules ownership was established through relationship to the goods as witnessed by other people through possession through use and display wearing was a really good way to establish ownership. so was buying and selling in public. sarah allingham ultimately lost her she to rose annamarara because rosanna marra had exactly the kind of evidence that proved possession and took the place of the information. i received she had witnesses who could describe the property and value it connected to the purported owner provide the data purchase verify the transaction and she actually had the sheet in her possession. there were also rules for exchange people pond cloth, or they wanted it back. they loaded if they did not in pawning people used clothing and other textiles is collateral against which they borrow a pain fees which was interest each week people charged with f actually would point out that they had pawned the goods which meant they didn't steal them because they could always get them back. they had not yet reduced them to their possession but loans were different with loans the owner expected the return of the textiles value plus interest not the goods themselves which declined in value and use over time. nobody wants the handkerchief that you just somebody else blew their nose and back. so the terms were then agreed to at the time of the loan verbally. and this is actually what sarah allenhan's case was all about the testimony that she had blown the testimony suggest that she had actually loaned the sheet to her neighbor sally riley not because riley was in desperate need of badlands, but because both women were leveraging the sheets value riley then sold it to rosanna marra, which was accepted practice and did not negate her obligation to repay the value of the sheet. it was only after alling him believe that riley had reneged of the loan that she took matters into her own hand and sees the sheet hoping to recruit some of her loss. then she went to court because it was never just about the sheet the rules of exchange really mattered those expectations of enforcement ran deep in kept local courts in both rural and urban areas very very busy. it is really remarkable that people without property rights felt confident in pursuing cases that looked an awful lot like assertions of property rights even more remarkable is responsive local officials who dutifully sorted through the evidence involving sheets shifts. tips shirts and shoes to figure out whose property was whose the legal qualities of textiles though only went so far and the book traces the trajectory of their use their eyes. they're used in decline and over time. people without property rights could not make claims through civil actions the usual means of reclaiming property through debt cases for instance because such suits required the possession of rights. even people with rights but on the legal margins because of racing class found civil actions difficult because they did not have the resources and the kinds of evidence necessary to produce to pursue them. so officials then shifted claims to prep to public law where they could be tried as criminal offenses. usually theft the point in this area of law was to write wrongs to put things back where they belong to make things right and that included sheets. so in this body of law court officials could act on complaints by people without the rights necessary in civil cases by treating these matters as things involving the public order, so they're a violation of the public order not a of their individual rights. matters involving claims to textiles also fit really well within this area of law because the legal principles that allowed everyone to owed and trade these goods we're so well established and established through practice as part of the public order. prosecution affirm those practices and restored the property to the places where they belong without recognizing the rights of the individuals involved now this provided some flexibility for people to make legal claims claims, but it also came with real costs the legal charge theft. was it convenience, but it made the very property claims of people without strong claims to property rights. it made all of those claims to property different and it made them also seem illegitimate. in fact, it criminalized them. somebody could own the property, but another person was declared a criminal the implications while ominous in the decades following the revolution would become inescapable as mid-century approached and the balance of legal author. to shifting towards those areas of law that focus more on the rights of individuals. now writes had definite advantages over textiles reclaims to textiles state in particular contexts with the people who knew about them the people who had testify about them the people who could show that they own them rightspace claims to property traveled freely with individuals had rights, they could claim property across all the mess of jurisdictional lines in the federal system within states from state to state from states to territories and pretty much in all bodies of laws. well, now this kind of portability mattered in a world where people moved and goods also flowed freely. in fact rights particularly property rights for this rare constant across all the jurisdictional lines of local state and federal. but that situation was challenging for merchants who were working across all of these jurisdictional lines, and it's so they needed some sort of constant that allowed them to to do business and in do this make sense similar kinds of claims across these church just from the lines, but the problems were awesome more fundamental here. so all of these laws all of these jurisdictions determined a person status and how they can move through the world. so people of african descent notably. we're presumed to be enslaved in some states and free and others. so this is a problem. no wonder then that the elimination of all of these restrictions and rights particularly property rights, we can key political issues for women for african americans the decades leading up to the civil war right to the things that allow people status also to have constancy across all this massive jur. the lines the problem though. is that the extension of rights did not allow for the kind of claims made with textiles nor did they eliminate the other legal restrictions that kept all women many african americans and even poor white men from claiming and using rights. textiles had given these people legal cover, but without them they were vulnerable. now to be sure the extension of rights helped. in fact, it was impossible to navigate either the legal order or the economy without them but the possession of rights only went so far as long as other kinds of restrictions remain in place. so by the late 19th century actually as the book argues many americans had little more than the close in their backs, but that property had become pretty flimsy legal coverings by that. and the people on the legal margins though, and this is i think really the point of the book did not just wait around for rights to be extended to them. they use the legal materials. they had at hand throughout the 19th century to work toward a world where claim their labor possess property and define their own destinies and those legal materials were literally the clothes on their backs. thank you very much laura edwards. our first discussion this afternoon is professor martha s jones, who is the society of black alumni presidential professor professor of history and a professor at the snf agora institute at the johns hopkins university. she is a legal and cultural historian. who's work examines. how blat americans have shaped the story of american democracy. professor jones is the author of vanguard. how black women broke barriers won the vote and insisted on a quality for all published in 2020 and was selected as one of times 100 must read for that year. she is also the author of the award-winning birthright citizens a history of race and rights in antebellum america published in 2018 all bound up together the woman questioned in african-american public culture 1830 to 1900 published in 2007, and she's co-editor of toward an intellectual history of black women published in 2015 prior to her academic career. she was a public interest to litigator in new york city, and she currently serves on the boards on the society of american historians national women's history museum the us capital historical society johns hopkins university, press the general of african-american history and slavery and abolition. professor jones martha welcome to the seminar screen is yours. thanks very much, eric. thank you to the washington history seminar and the aha in the wilson center for convening us today. and i want to start by saying very distinctly remember. when i said almost simultaneously to laura edwards and to making sweeney both that they had to meet one another they had to trade notes here were these two extraordinary scholars with such deep engagement and commitment to the craft and to the culture and to the everyday life of textiles even in their own lives. that means that this afternoon. i'm a bit of a happy interloper. i can barely thread a needle and i need to read the label to distinguish between rayon and silk. and still from both of you. i've learned so much about my own archives and the women who vomit who i have encountered there pilfering and thieving and secreting and snatching and otherwise claiming fabric and clothes that were not their own. if in local courthouses, these were women deemed petty thieves and on occasion actually not so petty. it was in conversation with laura edwards and through her work that has become this magnificent book only the clothes on her back that i was required to return to those archives and read them a new. so, thank you laura for the book for your mentorship and for your example. it has been truly transformative in my work. so when i say this book is much anticipated. well, that's an understatement i guess but many of us have been treated to parts of this work over the years at conferences and workshops and through comments on panels all of which suggested the degree to which this would be path breaking and so here we are to offer congratulations and some comment. one of the things that's remarkable about this book is the degree to which historians of capitalism of early america's many legalities along with historians of textiles trade the economic lives of women and more will be fascinated and changed by this study. laura edwards has brought her vast and field defining expertise on the quotidian and yet profoundly consequential dynamics of local legal culture into conversation with the far-reaching. even global dynamics that defined the production trade and the market of textiles and early america. these latter what in my work might be abstract matters on it might cause the eyes of cultural historians like me to glaze over but laura edwards of course has stories as you've already heard this afternoon one of the strengths of this work is it's insistence and it's deep capacity to bear out the claim that local people ordinary americans even those marginalized and formal law. we're connected to global markets and changed market forces in their own lives and by their own terms. it's a work that takes us back to dylan penningroth's important enduring claims of kinfolk. as i read this again. i remembered these are histories that take new and even unorthodox points of view that change our thinking no longer are ordinary people merely those buffeted about by capitalism's market forces their agents of law and lawmaking and while laura might see it. otherwise for me. this is the best of the approach to legal history pioneered by folks like dirk hartog and exemplified in his article pigs and positivism now many decades ago, the law was what people even ordinary people made it out to be. it was the contest that they waged the debates they weighed in on all that rather than the text alone is for us the history of law. one of the things i think readers might not anticipate is how this book is also an elegant primer in the history of fabrics and textiles. they're crafting production styling and more. such an insider's perspective could require a glossary in a less well-written book but here the value of textiles comes plain as we learn what it took to render them as articles of practical adornment. pretentious beauty and even class and status this foundation is what permits us to accept how such materials also became economic instruments currency capital and credit. any historian who has read a will or a state inventory has noted a family squabble over garments and fabric or like me marvel that how many cases on a 19th century local courthouse criminal docket mentioned the theft of textiles and clothes by someone who had no apparent use for them. finally has an answer to the questions these archives present. as laura edwards explains these items were property unlike any other and their value extended far beyond how they adorned oneself one's dependence or one's home textiles were property of a distinct sword so much so that even americans shunted to the margins of legal culture could claim their places and their property in court houses nearly uncanny success. this is a book of consequence for historians of law broadly be they scholars of latin america africa and asia. or those across many us subfields including african-american native american women's history. so many of us are at work on the intersection of ordinary people and global markets, and we see our archives in new through this work. i do have a sort of i don't know rambly questioned for laura edwards, and i'll try it here and hope we'll get to it in discussion and it really is about and laura you'll recognize this question because it's not the first time i've asked it of you about scale or the register of this work on the on the one hand. those of us who know your work are not surprised how you render this history as profoundly intimate right shaped by the rules and the logic that were local so that we see how ordinary people's engagements with markets that were far-flung actually played out on the ground in lives. and then the other hand there, is that other scale. this is a history that plays out on a world scale across europe across asia across the americas knit together by movements ocean season rivers, and i'm interested still in how you think about the choices of emphasis how you help us sort of stay steady as we're asked and you demand of us to think in these varied frames folks will encounter those references to india and china in the middle east that help us. i think to anchor those kinds of questions and for me only the clothes on her back enjoins with scholars who have importantly taken the history of women in textiles in particular beyond the history of labor beyond the history of fashion and adornment. to find at least political though. i think half-breaking here is finding not only the political but the legal meaning of those actions and transactions. i'm interested in intrigued by how native american historians will also find their way to and into this book, um, thinking about native americans own local legal cultures. yes, but the central role of textiles textile making fashioning and more in native american culture and they will figure here. so i think that's my time, but i do again want to say thank you to everybody for convenience. and especially thank you to laura edwards for this extraordinary book. it's really an honor to be here with you. thank you, martha. laura would you like to respond to that question that rather grand question that was just posed before we move on. sure sure. scale scale i had a really hard time with this book because on the one hand i started researching in the south thinking that a regional frame was the appropriate one and then it became very clear that region did not explain what i was looking for states did not explain what i was looking at actually and with this weird at least to me thinking at that time similarities between what was going on and like the new york city mayor's court in charleston, south carolina and south carolina up country and north carolina in pennsylvania, and it was strange to me because these were really very local jurisdictions that i was looking at, but the rules were operating when it came to textiles in a very similar way and i was like scratch in my head. i don't understand this and yet it became there when i started thinking about the global textile market and i started reading back in time and thinking about the way that in fact these goods have been moving across borders before there were even national borders right and that there's also real their legal principles that are developing relationship to the goods attach the goods and start to travel with them. so i had to really think outside our usual framework for understanding law right and policy. we usually think within a national framework and it was not the national framework that was operative here was actually a global market global trade in the principles that developed through them through those dynamics and then that spread to people that people picked up and used and so all of these legal principles kind of travel with the textiles themselves, but then they get out of root down and local areas people know them but to make them work it requires a lot of local knowledge. so you get the general principles, which is, you know, along the lines of the things that clothing attaches to you and if you have it you probably own it, but then in order at that you have to go very local because you know, which shirt belongs to which person is actually about a personal relationship to that particular item. so it is at once global and local and then part of the story is this development of the state law, but then kind of a national legal culture based on rights that circulates across all of these local jurisdictions that start to developing an intervening with all of this as well. so i'm trying to handle all of this scales at once and keep the focus, you know on the textiles, but as they move around through these jurisdictions as well. thank you very much before we move on just a reminder to those of you who are watching. you can participate as well. we have a number of people who have posed questions in the q&a function, but you could also use the raise hand function which has the advantage of i get to call on you and if you unmute you get to pose your question directly so you can start getting in the queue now if you so desire just an fyi. our second discussing this afternoon is megan sweeney the arthur f turnow associate professor of english afro-american and african studies and women's and gender studies at the university of michigan in ann arbor. she earned a ba in the history and literatures of religions from northwestern university and 1989 and a phd in literature from duke university in 2004. our publications include an award-winning monograph reading is my window books and the art of reading in women's prison published in 2010 and edited collection the story within us women prisoners reflect on reading 2012 and a collection of clothing related lyric essays called mendings, which is forthcoming from duke university, press in 2000 23 at the university of michigan megan sweeney currently serves as associate chair and as graduate studies in the women's and gender studies program as well as director of undergraduate studies in the department of english language and literature and as director of the hopwood program megan, welcome to the washington history seminar. thank you so much eric for that and i just want to say it's such an honor for me to participate in this conversation with both of you laura and martha, and i'm so grateful to have been brought together by this wonderful book. i remember when martha first told me about you laura and it's been so fun to dig into your work as you say about yourself and your acknowledgments. laura textiles have always distracted me too, and i want to begin by sharing two quick anecdotes that came to mind as i was reading only the clothes on her back. first in your acknowledgments you reference mulberry silks and carrboro, north carolina. i visited that shop about 35 years ago and keenly recall buying one yard of gorgeous fabric because that was all that i could afford but i was determined to design and sew a shirt with that amount. second when my husband and i got married many years ago my family gave us a spinning wheel and a loom as wedding gifts and we signed up for a spinning class while we were in graduate school, but ended up having to drop the class because the spinning was so difficult and we didn't have time to practice. i created some very lumpy strands that broke about every 30 seconds so i can attest to the considerable skill and dexterity and experience required for spinning and i want to say hats off to the many spinners you honor in your book. in terms of comments and questions about only the close on her back. i'd like to dwell for a minute on broader dimensions of the book that i especially admire and then get into some details with an observation and a few questions. throughout my reading i kept marveling at what a lucid compelling and lively account you offer of dense concepts and complex examples. i teach a course called threads what does clothing have to do with race culture politics and the environment and i'm so excited to incorporate more insights from your book into that course. i love your use of the weaving terms warp and weft to describe how people without strong claims to rights or property participated in constructing the country's legal fabric if we think of the warp as the laws that restricted most americans legal status and the weft as the textiles that people made legally meaningful. i love how you've organized each chapter around a particular historical case paired with a central concept such as currency credit or erasure those concepts provide such a helpful guide for readers. i love your manifest appreciation for the everyday textile artists confined to the margins of history and you're appreciation of their creations, which is evident when you describe for instance the rich details about preparing flax or fulling wool or when you rest on the bit of ribbon or lace that's in the story and i love the moments in which you dwell on the delightful language of the world. you conjure much of which is lost to us today. ali bally's carrie dairies do foodies gorgaons hums and iseries i love to your flashes of wit and humor throughout the book starting on the first page with your hopes that elizabeth billings donned more appropriate footwear for her attempted escape than the floral silk heals that she stole from her mistress. before i ask my questions, i'd like to share one connection that i made in reading that i was really struck by. you draw attention to the insidious ways in which women's household production was devalued as merely domestic labor and was artificially and erroneously separated from market-oriented production. this point reminded me of a wonderful documentary. called angry and nook created by aletheia arnacook buril in 2016 the film focuses on efforts to ban commercial seal hunting and those efforts have been absolutely devastating for inuit people in the canadian arctic inuit women process and prepare the skins for sale in their homes, but they're livelihood and the community survival is totally dependent on the commercial trade in seal skins. so women's textile related domestic work is part of the commercial market but the inuit are repeatedly told by activists that they are protected from negative effects of the ban by an exception that allows inuits to hunt seals for personal use the activists refusal to recognize the embracation of inuit women's domestic and commercial work struck me as a contemporary version of the illegible nature of some women's commercial textile work that you describe so beautifully in your book. my first question has a long windup. so please bear with me throughout your book you maintain a wonderful balance. i think between on the one hand recognizing the concrete social economic and legal inequalities that shape the daily lives of those without strong claims to rights or property and on the other hand illuminating the creative resourceful and often very moving ways. in which these ordinary people exercised agency in the midst of constraint in terms of concrete limits. you remind us that textiles under wrote the slave trade you emphasize as you've mentioned today that asserting property claims to textiles criminalized a huge range of property transactions as theft that it was a fragile and fleeting form of agency that was unequally available to those on the margins given race and gender restrictions, and then it did nothing to challenge the foundational racial gender and class inequities of the social order but at the same time your book highlights so many savvy important forms of quotidian agency including as one example the sutterfuge that people performed in accounting for time and labor that did not belong to them according to civil law either by committing nothing to writing or an example that i loved by tracking things in diaries or recipe books or commonplace books to prevent the property from being merged with a husband's property or an employer's property. and a second example you talk about how women's quilting circles and sewing circles and dress fittings. where as much about creating and maintaining property claims as they were about sociability or charity or the pulling of labor. your account also unsettles and challenges so many ideas that have long seemed like givens such as that married white women and enslaved people could not act as merchants or manufacturers or that people on society's margins could never expect or demand recourse to the law or that written codification of rights-based law represents unequivocal progress. and in unsettling these givens you vividly evoke realities that seem quite distant or even unimaginable today. such as in this is i think something that martha was invoking a concept of law as practice based in the customs of local communities and known widely by all as opposed to our concept of law as universal principles based in the rights of individuals, which write residing books and are is only available the trained few. if you emphasize the idea of local courts that had strong connections to the communities in which they were situated and that revolved around relationships. you emphasize the idea that public law incorporated those without rights and to its basic workings because they were part of the public body. you emphasize the idea that relationships a wee made it possible for individuals on the legal margins to act as an eye who could make claims to property. you emphasize the idea of commercial transactions as matters of relationship instead of distanced exchanges removed from social contexts. and you emphasize the idea that most people paid keen attention to the intimate details of clothing and thought of long-lasting well-made clothing as one of the most important forms of property investment. here finally is my question. so keeping in mind your admirable refusal to romanticize the past that you conjure. i'm wondering if in the course of your research you ever found glimmers of possibility or food for thought that seemed helpful for reimagining some of our current givens as a reader. i found it helpful and i dare say even hopeful. to be reminded of that ideas that now seem immutable and irrefutable are time bound and potentially ephemeral. so i found myself wondering what we might learn from the worlds you evoke in your book about contemporary possibilities for things like secondhand markets and exchanges or local economies and mutual aid or forms of local restorative even transformative justice or ways to rest clothing from its participation in exploitative labor practices and environmental devastation. so i'm wondering to what extent if any did you encounter ideas in your research that sparked your imagination about other ways that we might live in relation to clothing and also in relation to each other so very long and winding question, but but i hope it landed at a comprehensible place. right and i have one more question too. but if if it's helpful to go there first. sure, that that's that's a huge question megan and what my goodness yes, you this book is i found other people in this book. i really liked them and i found them. puzzling but i found them so incredibly admirable if they're creativity of the ways that they reimagined how they could work with the tools that they had and in this instance. it's these, you know, principles attached to textiles, but the textiles themselves they kind of reimagined who they were through their material where their relationship the relationship to these material goods and the ways that they could make these goods themselves too. it's it put not only legal agency but economic agency in their hands in a way that i found refreshing given the general presumptions that these people are kind of buffeted about by economic change and by you know the laws, country which simply exploited them and give them very little room from maneuver. what i found really fascinating was some of the things that you were pointing out with like the wii and i this idea that in fact you had to have a group of people who could support you that this was more important than this idea of an individual right for people who don't have power and so this book really made me think very clearly and kind of critically in ways that i hadn't before about the difference between power and rights. i think that right now we tend to presume that if you have right you have power and it was very clear from doing the research for this book that in this period that if you had rights, sometimes that wasn't really very useful because you didn't have the power to use them and in other instances, you know, you just didn't have rights, but you could have considerable power actually, so it made me separate these two things and textiles is the way of rethinking this right so that you know a wealthy woman who owned all kinds of clothing, but then all kinds of bed linens and textiles. she would have a group of people who knew that who could you know, actually attach those goods to her, but without that group of people those goods might move over into her husband's possessions because she was married to him coverture would place valuable property into the ambit of her husband's legal claims, but she needed that group of people around her to make sure that those that property stayed with her and this was even more important for enslaved women for instance, too, and i have a an example in the book polly who actually has a small business of our own spinning thread, but people see probably spinning the thread they see her dying the thread they know that it's her thread all of those people who know that about her they're able to help buttress her claims to this so it's not her right? it's the power that she has through those relationships and it's this creation. be that is really important. this is also important for mothers and daughters. so we've seen people have hope chests. i know this my mother had a hope chest actually my grandmother had a hope chest. hope chests are full of like bed linens and other kinds of textiles usually but i hope chest we imagine is oh, those are the kinds of just the things that women get when they get married and there's just, you know to help her set up the household and that's it. but actually this is a transfer of capital from mothers to daughters. so mothers who often control the labor of their daughters would allow the daughters to claim the fruits of their own labor what they produced in terms of textiles or sometimes what they made in other kinds of productive activities, but then purchase textiles they then took those put those textiles and trunks which actually are legal containers to the limit property. and then the daughters had capital that they could keep in the marriage. so this is not just consumer goods. this is actually capital that they have that can take a woman through difficult times and would be also removed from her husband's creditors. it's like, oh my gosh, this is actually a wee again of the mother the daughter and then people who know about this property creating secure claims to this really valuable form of capital. so it's interesting for me to think about power that way rather than right, but then think about power and creative ways to for today, right because we assume that rights will solve a whole range of problems in our society, but it may be that rights have less power to resolve those issues then this collective sense of these relationships we have to other people this sense of communal action of the ideas the public good and the power that you can get through exactly those kinds of relationships that we may have. too much in individuals and not seeing how all of this relationships and actually legal principles that attach to goods and that are created through those relationships how important those are. so that was a long-winded answer to your question, and i think there are other things in here too that i find really interesting like skill and the importance of skill and understanding value, but i'll leave it there and you ask your other question. megan back to you. wonderful. thank you. my second question has a much shorter windup, but it has two quick parts as a non-historian but in many ways i want to be historian. i found myself thinking a lot about method as i was reading your book and the first part of my question is given the many silences and gaps in the archive. i'd love to hear more about when and how you realized that you had a new different story to tell how did the story coalesce for you since so much of it goes against the grain of received wisdom? and the second part is i'd love to hear more about how you taught yourself to read. the extant materials many of which require very different kinds of literacy. i'm thinking for instance of how elizabeth bagby recorded as memoranda the transactions related to textiles that she actually produced and traded. or how rebecca kate recorded her her own work as a wife who did uncompensated domestic labor and also the wage work performed by her unmarried sister. how did you acquire the literacy for parsing these practices for what they were given how little they have been visible in the record of explanation. yeah, so elizabeth bagby for everybody else who hasn't read the book elizabeth. bagby has a memorandum book. actually. it's it's called a memorandum book. it's called a commonplace book in the archives. it's not really a commonplace book. it's just what it's labeled and she has all of her weaving accounts in this book and at the beginning though, she has a quote and i'm gonna forget the exact quote but it's basically for all the goods that belong to the household. you must keep careful account, but for the goods cheaper to produce within yourself, and essentially the goods are belong to her. it's best to keep memoranda, and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that for i don't know several years and then i was like, oh my gosh, she's actually talking about household accounts the goods that she produces as a wife under curvature that belonged to her husband and their creditors and then the memoranda is a way of separating out her goods and so you have account books and you have accounts because i've been looking at account books and puzzling over when women appear when they don't appear when enslave people appear when they don't appear. and it occurred to me. it's like oh those are legal records. nobody uses account books in this period to like track economic production or figure out you know, how to better your business. it is a legal record to determine who's in debt to you and who's not and how much they owe so women don't appear in there because it's a legal form where it's unnecessary generally for married women to appear or enslave people to appear because you can't sue them in civil court, which is where like account looks matter. memoranda is something else you take it in a different form. it looks different the material qualities of it are different. and so that's a memorandum. it's not an account, which means that you've separated out your property and that the memoranda establishes your connection to it, but it doesn't give creditors your husband or their creditors any claim to that. and so, you know, i don't know it's these moments where you have this tension where something doesn't make sense and it's those weird sentences and that was one of them. it's like best to keep memoranda. what does that mean and then all of a sudden we sort of when the context of the larger like account book universe it starts making more sense and then once you get that little kind of clue there just like oh then the whole chapter starts unfolding or several those chapters starting unfolding with looking at how people do track their accounts and they attract accounts verbally, which have a different kind of legal resonance. they attract counts through the material goods themselves people would bring in for instance if you accused of stealing address and then bring in the dress and say see, i didn't steal it like why would you do that? that's not very like credible evidence to me. you could still bring in the stolen dress, right? but this is all part of a logic whereby if you are claiming like your connection to it you're showing your connection to a material good then that's a way of showing that you in fact do own it and have legal claim to it. you would never bring in something that you had dolan that you don't have legal claim to because you would be hiding it and you would have actually like put it into the secondary market and got rid of it as fast as possible right to have claimed it to have kept it and then to wear it shows that you actually have this legal claim to it. so you have to start then piecing together the pieces of evidence that don't make sense and then try to like create the pattern. so i just feel like this is a puzzle and you get little pieces of the puzzle and it's gonna put this down. this is a corner piece. i think oh it is a corner piece then all the sudden other things start taking shape and with this it was really like seeing a world that i couldn't i didn't notice there and i found it really kind of exciting to piece together for instance the accounting and the ways that people are trying to hide their whole economic world because if they put it in writing and put it in certain forms, it's going to move into the hands of their masters their employers. and their fathers and i found this particularly compelling with enslaved people who are constantly hiding the forms of accounting and yet constantly depending on all of this relationships that people seeing their goods. so it's utterly public and yet we can no longer see it as historians because the evidence was kept in a way that is not saved and not visible and for a reason right so we have all of the written evidence of the economic world of the men with property who could work in civil law because that is in writing and it was saved in particular kinds of forms that now in archives and so we think that's the only thing and yet there's this whole other world out there that was documented in very different ways and we don't see that anymore to me that gets back to your first question too. it's like there are there's a whole world there that we're unaware of that we could still draw on because the possibilities to imagine economic exchange power people's relationships a lot. it's much broader in our past than what we had assumed. thank you. it's wonderful. thank you. we're now going to open this up to those in the audience. we have a hand patiently waiting to be called upon sonia michelle, you know the routine please unmute. join the conversation thank you, eric. and thank you very much laura for what sounds like a fascinating book. i ordered it while you were talking. i am. sorry. i missed the first few minutes, but um, i ordered it as soon as i heard you're talking about it. um, first of all, just let me start with a little anecdote perhaps you read in the new york times last week. there was an article about the ukrainian air force and there was one line that struck me where they described the wife of one of the pilots and he said and the article said she spends her days weaving homemade camouflage nets for the ukrainian army. that phrase was just so incredibly evocative. i don't know if you know i've abandoned history and i'm now become an artist and i immediately started working on a collage that to that evoke to me what it what the camouflage that's must look like these homemade camouflage nuts, but i do have a question or a sort of serious question. um, and i'm sorry, i didn't hear the sort of a whole overview of your book. so maybe you've already touched on this but what is the relationship between i mean throughout the 19th century what? production weaving and so forth was becoming increasingly industrialized and i wonder if that's a thread or a theme through the book and if so how that relates to this but obviously seems to be another focus of yours. that is the the individual and handmade production of textiles and then sort of going in a somewhat different direction what i was doing the wash this morning and i was thinking about laundry. what is the relationship between laundry textile production on and laundry on the one hand and textile production and women's dress making and tailoring on the other and the sort of gendering of all of those activities. i wonder if you talk about all of that in the book. and yeah, so let me do laundry first. i'd like laundering is how you rehabilitate textiles. so in laundry is really important because as actually megan i believe was saying it's a having well made. fitted clothes that are well-kept. it's like this is really important to people this is not just sort of like poor people do this because it's really meaningful to them. they're not doing it simply to you know, like to try to aspire to middle class values or anything. this is this is something that is incredibly important because it is supposed to clothing represent your inner self. and is your your inner self is expressed through your outer layers. and so this is about, you know, making a statement about your character and it is seen as really important to like tend to that and so it's not just a matter of having expensive clothing. it's a matter of keeping it up and making sure it's well fitted and well-tended and so laundry is a part of that and poor people go to extraordinary links to wander. listen to have white and then in a particular caffeine brown is written about this. john stiles is written about this. but laundering is also about adding value right? so if you think about the the metaphors and the imagery here, it's like money laundering you make it clean, but you can make clothing clean and you launder it and you turn it into a better version of itself. you're adding value that way and i found it really fascinating to think about the production of clothing laundering but also all the kinds of mending and then remaking of clothes that people do they're constantly adding value to this stuff and so it's not just making it prettier. it is in fact, you know turning making this into a more valuable item and then that's part of adding value and like exchanging it and turning into currency as well. so i feel like people are kind of printing money in some ways when they're doing this and that part we've never really kind of considered i find that to be fascinating so the industrialization part you know, that's the storyline is that that i was raised on and that i think it's still kind of central to the literature. is that the early 19th century you get the mechanization of cotton production and weaving and spinning you get the low mills and then it all is basically industrialized in the focus on is on people who work in the mill. so the presumption that basically mechanization is taking over the whole situation here when textile production but then i started looking in and it's actually way more complicated than that. so textiles are unevenly mechanized. so cotton is mechanized wool is much harder to mechanize although it is mechanized faster linen isn't really mechanized until in the late 19th or the 20th century and silk is also the weaving of it becomes mechanized but still the making of silk is actually really difficult in the weaving of it is is difficult to it's more moderately mechanized. so the other so there are all sorts of spaces. economy for hand labor, especially within in production with wool. the best wool is still done by hand in cotton production is also a lot of really fine cons. you're still done by him because the stuff that machines do isn't that great at first and then the more stuff you produce the more opportunities the art of fashion it into clothing which actually produces more hand labor and so you'll find a lot of hand labor like in the delaware river valley for instance that is growing up alongside factory labor, and this gets to that, you know, skills and value and even then if you're working in a factory skills still matter, so it's not like you just anybody can walk in there and do it, although somehow we tend to presume that and the same way that we kind of resume anybody so stuff right all when they could do that. it's like no it's actually takes a lot of skill and like really good class if it's well done. that's what makes it commercially viable. so, you know and before mechanization basically all cloth is done in the household and what distinguishes you know homespun from commercial cloth is the quality. and the quality is not something that is determined by gender women reduce quality or people can produce quality. it's protect it has nothing to do with race either it has to do with somebody's skills so women and you know enslave people free blacks all these people are concentrating oftentimes in textile hand production and also mechanized textile production, too, but textile hand production because they can basically create value with their hands, but they can also keep the value with their hands. and so i find this to be really important right? we've missed this key part of the whole explanation as to why these things are gendered, but i would argue also raised to because in fact out of all the things that you can produce out of all of your very bad options if you are a woman a poor person or a person of color in this period textile production actually provides you a way to keep at least some of what you produce and legally and this is really important. so for instance, have these letters that were in duke university. manuscripts archives and they're from women who in 1840s were working low mills. they turn all of their wages into fabric. and i find this fascinating right so they buy fabric they can buy it in low, and it's a good deal relative to where they live. they then go home and sell it and there's all this correspondence back and forth between the sisters. it's like don't tell people how much it costs at all because they want to charge more back at home. right and then they have all this other kinds of, you know directives as an i'm sending you, you know this large cut of long cut of coffee. don't cut it up. don't cut it up to sell it that will devalue it and so they're very aware here of what kinds of goods they can produce but then i'll also what kinds of value they can claim all of those women are actually unmarried but the connection of women in textiles is so close that you know, the idea that if you're a woman textiles textiles is the thing you do and you trade in that has become really ingrained by that point. so yeah, i think that piece of it is really important for understanding industrialization, but then also seeing industrialization actually increases the spaces and opportunities for skilled and labor to thank you. michael. novak. you've got a hand up, please join us. can you hear me? yes we can. okay. good afternoon. thank you for being here. my question is your talking a lot about the about the manufacturing of cloth and textiles and how it relates to people's role in the law in the economy. i was wondering if this is if this is in relating anyway if you've looked into the making of shoes and if that was similar if there was it was totally different. i don't know if you've looked at that. i'm just curious if you have if you found anything interesting. yeah, i don't actually look into the making of shoes but people claim shoes that kind of include shoes in the textile rubric which i find fascinating like i think this relates to some of martha was talking about these people are really they're very creative and it's like textiles and clothing belongs to me that handkerchiefs belong to me too and hats oh and scarves and shoes too. so, you know, basically after certain point is like well it has something to do with textiles feathers are for hats right if it passes through my hands i own it. so it's not just the clothing you wear. it's all this other stuff and so all the accessories get included in or people try to include them in and they're fairly successful in doing so although not always right so they include all those in there and so that's kind of why i have this people always ask me what are textiles. it's like, well basically it's a legal category. it's all the goods that you can include within this category in this category sort of extends out to include shoes. there is one great case with this where there's an enslaved man if you has a solid business dealing in dry goods to other encycloped people in his community and he is accused of stealing shoes. i think this also gets back to this question of i and we and so what he does is he brings out all of the enslaved customers who shop with him essentially and he has a store in it's a store of goods not an actual physical place and so he brings out all of these witnesses who one lines up and says, no the shoes that you say we're stolen he didn't have them because the shoes he was selling those shoes are really poor quality and i was looking for like better shoes. so, you know, he's saying no those weren't the shoes he had, you know, we have another person line up and say no. no, there's something else going on here. there was actually a fight about so this as they're all testifying about the goods of this man has and the fact that he has goods and is selling to other enslaved people as a way than of saying that no, he didn't actually steal the goods. it's really name because in fact they all could have been arrested for like, you know, he could be arrested for for dealing goods with enslaved people. he's not supposed to be selling but all of that became evidence of the fact that he didn't steal the shoes in question because other people saw him with a whole different array of goods, but not the shoes. so again, it was the way that he was dealing all the people surrounding him within able to ultimately save him from that theft charge and it was also interesting that the mattresses didn't really care that he was like selling shoes and other dry goods in the secondary market they were more concerned with theft, but the presumption was he could make some sort of legal claims to those goods and in fact so much so that he could even engage in selling them. so thank you up next to leon fink and then if ursula rack could stand by we'll call on you after leon. hey laura. hey leon, but here this account of what i'm sure is gonna is a great book. leon i think we've lost you. i was intrigued by your response to sonia michelle's. hello. hello, can you hear me on yes? can you hear me so we can okay. i don't know what the problem is up. in any case i was interested in the relationship laura between the world that you're describing of basically home-based textile production and industrial world of production that we're more familiar with at least as labor historians are and i was in interested in your suggestion that there's maybe an interaction between these two worlds, but one distinction seems to be that at least the is in the methods of attending to grievances in your world. it seems to be an individual and legal arena and the more industrial centers. it is a history. um, you know from through amusky through the southern mills seems to be a more collective of form of address. could you comment on that distinction and what you think might be the interactions and you think there's a whole world of labor history that might for example among even among industrial textile workers who might at the same time be involved not only in home production, but also in legal complaints that were we haven't really examined yet. yeah, you know, i was really struck. i mean i was like i said raised on that distinction between you have to household production you have the industrial production and yet a lot of the work in textile and textile history is blurring all those distinctions by pushing at least commercialization, but also the transformation of labor relations not just the commercialization back in time and putting that actually within households. so you have putting out system. you have the breakup of of independent producers and having them glumped under you know, somebody who's a merchant who's then organizing production? and skimming, you know from the top of basically they become wage workers but working in their households and often relying on household labor of women and children. so all that is happening within households, but then those people sort of move into industry into into factories, but that transition i don't think this is abrupt as what we've imagined and some of the people who are coming to the united states are like, you know, they're they're refugees from the linen industry in the british isles and the woolen industry too in the british isles. and so they're trying to get away from that system, but they're also relying on the skills then to set up shop in their own homes and often the women are the ones who are taking over that kind of labor, but then it's an easy sort of transition into some of these factory settings where it's not quite as abrupt as you see in cotton so you would have wool factories where you might be working in the factory, but you're kind of doing the same thing you'll be doing at home and some will factories are actually putting out systems. so a seth rogmans work is really interesting in this regard, but then i think your question about communal approaches that i think you're getting the wrong impression if you think i'm saying that these are individual and individualistic claims. i mean, that would be the kind of the the gloss that civil outlets on this where your frame the legal framework cashew as an individual with rights you then makes claims against another individual this is taking place in even then actually a lot of and i'm hoping the book like underscourses even then that's a legal frame and in fact all of that depends on a whole bunch of evidence that is involved with it depends on other people knowing about your property claims and be able to come and justify that and support you and all of that. so there's usually a community behind any sort of legal claim to property but then if you look at the public side that i'm talking about where people are making claims to property without rights you come in with your whole crew. sarah allingham did it actually is what sarah alham didn't do. it's what roseanna marra did so she comes in with her she and her witnesses and all these people come in and you've got to have all those folks and so there is a sense of community and collaboration in there of understanding what certain you know, a principles are in your community what sort of practices are accepted and then it's a constant effort of enforcement which involves a whole range of people and if you think about it, that's not so different from what's going on mills where like you have certain expectations about workplace practices about value of your labor about the relationships. you have at the people who are employing you and then there's collective action around that you're just going to get more collective action because you're all alone together in that factory, right? but you find the same kinds of expectations with the enforcement of the practices surrounding the exchange and ownership of excels generally, so i don't think they're as dissimilar. actually. i think there's overlap there. and i think that the framework as i said earlier like the right space framework. it's a legal framework and to mistake that with how things actually work is to like mix those things up. i mean the legal framework is not social how so people think about property. it's how the legal framework handles that and people slot their issues into that framework. and sometimes that framework is really important in the way that people start imagining things, but it's entirely different from the way people actually operate oftentimes. thank you ursula rack. you've been patiently waiting, please join us if you unmute. hello, good morning from new zealand. i'm a historian myself, and i was wondering what how was it with mains clothing, especially when they were younger and you know sons but what happened for example with the clothes when they have spent a father or yeah, the the owner of the woman died. how was that working was the clothes from the main also then in the position of the women or was only women's clothes and peddling and so on her property. thank you. so yeah, the clothes that belong to the person belong to the person so it's kind of it's not presumed then that the like a husband's clothes with them move to the wife and people are very particular about their clothes. so, you know like men are really particular about their clothes too and their wives are not their wives will like and this is kind of well established in scholarship that i did not do that wives are responsible for linens. basically, but men are like their coats and their pants they go off and do that themselves and i have a group of women coulee women who have in western virginia. you have a whole business and they they sell they be they do a bunch of different kinds of things all in textile production, but one of the sort of key customer bases is men who want really fancy coats from militia masters, and this is a thing so you have a uniform which is not actually uniform it is a uniform but there's nothing uniform about it. i also think that's kind of fascinating actually, so they all come with sort of the same style but different colors they want braids and they want epileps and they want, you know buckets and they need little trimmings over here. and so they do this, you know, they do the coats and the guys are really picky about what it looks like and they come in for fittings. just great. so there is this attachment of people to you know, the clothes that they wear that way and so within families, yes, it's it's the in the children's clothes are there's the wives closer there's and then the other textiles that they're able to kind of account for in their community in the community knows that they're theirs so there's this concert sort of sorting around that way but yes, the men's clothes don't automatically go to the wife the wife does not automatically own everything that's in the household it is she has to establish those claims just to work really hard to establish those clients. thank you. we have a question in the q&a her hand also went up but then it went down. so at least i have the question and i will pose it on behalf of kyra haynes who writes as someone who is doing their senior thesis on victorian fashion. could you talk about your research process and what it was like and what sources you relied upon for your research? so this is where i martha has. like listen to me talk about this research forever and ever and the research process was was long and arduous. i feel like i was doing this when i didn't know i was doing it so i started kind of like collecting stuff about textiles when i was doing my dissertation with him nothing to do with textiles. i just got distracted by it. so i've been collecting this for a very long time and i didn't really see how that off it together until or how i was gonna fit together until recently, but i've looked at court cases local court cases. i've looked at federal court cases. i think it's state court cases. i've looked at account books. i've looked at correspondence about clothing. this is not the kind of book that i looked at the material artifacts themselves. and so this is not really the kind of book that i could have done. early in my career. i think it's three. you're very privileged you accumulate things over time and in you're able to have these longer term projects and this is definitely one of those if i had just and i actually had a crisis of conscience and faith or i don't know method maybe would be a better way to put it when i was doing footnotes for an article recently and they said i cited a collection of court cases and they said no we need specific court cases that prove this point and the point i was making was about the legal qualities of trunks. so trunks are legal container for people who don't own their own houses. and so i had tons of cases on trunks hundreds of cases and trunks and i didn't know what trunks meant and then one day it occurred to me as i was looking at the hundreds of cases of trunks cases on trucks that that people were referring to trunks as a way to demarcate the property is theirs and it had definitely legal qualities and in fact you search warrants for trunks for instance. so i was stuck because i'm like am i supposed to cite the several hundred cases on trunks that i have because if you look at any one case you don't see the point it would just refer to a trunk and you would walk by that case like i had walked by those cases. it was just that i happened to make notes about trunks because i don't know i was like doing something verbatim, you know like transcription of the court record. so i didn't know what to do exactly because this is through practice and it's through repetition of these things. and so this gets looking to megan's question about method. it's like you have to look at this for a very long time and you have to look at it over and over and over and over and this is us that i think what you know, martha's comment too is about it's like this is about practice the way that it becomes law is if you do it over and over and over and over so it makes it really difficult to explain citations to folks because they're expecting the court case that establishes the principle and there's no one court case that does that in this instance. it's just the repetition and so you kind of have to hang in there long enough to get the repetition in persistent. so this works, but that's kind of difficult if you're like doing a senior thesis for instance. you don't have the time to do that. but if you could just elaborate a little bit more so you've had many years of experience with these records and the issues that you're dealing with. and so this is in the back of your mind it stays there and that allows you to see eventually things that you didn't see before, but you said terrific phrase seeing a world that i didn't know was there and i just i'd love that that phrasing but as a legal historian who is interested both in the law, but in the real people and the social relations that the law can help illuminate, it's safe to say that you're diving into the world of legal cases allows you to recreate that kind of broader social world and the dynamic and the relationships between people so these cases are about more than principle and outcomes, but they do allow you to see and then reconstitute this world that you didn't know was there. yeah, and it's like it's it's true. yes, and it's true. but if you look at like local court cases and martha feel free to lay in here on local court cases. so you get little fragments. it's like i have a paragraph and it will say, you know, so until ellen stoled something out of sue's trunk. and sue said it was in her. she hadn't closed the lid and i'm like, what is this about so you have them another case? it's about a you know, somebody else told something that's a list of stuff from a truck and you get another little phrase. you don't get much though. so it is about the repetition and so like for instance with trunks i realized you repetition that you keep the lid open then you've not reduced. what's in the trunk to your possession. this is important if you are enslaved or servant in a house because you could be accused of stealing something of your masters and mistresses is found in the trunk, but then you say the lid was open so you hadn't reduced it to your possession if you close the lid then you're in you're in like territory there where you you've claim the goods as your own because you've closed the lid. still gray though because you just closed it. you could open it back up which means that your master and mistress could come back in and then take whatever it is that they're accused of stealing out of the trunk if you close the lid and lock it then you've reduced this to your possession because you've made it so that is a container that nobody else can get into? understanding that though took me like hundreds of cases to figure it out. right? so and there's no one case that says ha the principle of the open trunk lid and so it is those legal cases the local cases in particular. are you just have to handle them differently than you would like a state or federal case where there are dealing with the principle of law and the point is to state that and here they're like, they're not and they're they're hiding this from kind of martha you could weigh in on this too. i think just push us a little bit, you know to say that you know what i think i've learned from you, but i don't want to speak for you. but what i've what i've taken from your work is the mistake we make is thinking that what law is is text that law is doctrine that laws the constitution that law is the common law as it is articulated and iterated over time. that is not law that law is requires for historians. yes and understanding of the text but ultimately the history of law is what people do with the text and how people in their practices produce the text and that is so it's to say that the distinction as if somehow there's law and then sort of mixing with laws something like i don't know social or cultural political history is sort of misses. i think the intervention because the intervention is to say that's a false distinction and that actually the history of law is the history of how parties people societies and more make meaning and how meaning changes over time how meaning is produced over time. so maybe i've overstated it laura, but that's a way to just sort of force the point i guess. yeah. thanks martha that just thank you. and yes and part of the point of this book too is to show kind of changes in that over time because we kind of take the institutional history of courts for granted. we kind of assume that there is this thing law it works in a certain way and you know, you got the higher court you got the lower courts, and it's always like that and part of this is to mess with people's heads about this to change our understanding of this history and so like a whole chapter on overlapping jurisdictions and overlapping bodies of law in the you know, the decades following the revolution and so it's even more important in the late 18th and early 19th century in the united states where they're different jurisdictions where they're different bodies of law where there is less coordination of all of that and so there is also a real sense that you can create principles to practice and so as martha was saying it's not that this practice and somehow then we have law over here. it's that the principles you can see and create through the practice and those principles have as much kind of legal traction as what is in a written text and over the course of this period though. you also do see that certain elements of written texts acquire more attraction and more power and authority within the legal system and those tend to be about right space laws based where you get more about procedure. so for instance in local court cases with all the women who bring in their textiles and say look i know and i bought it here and i did this and i'm wearing it and you understand all of that starts giving way to more procedural-based cases or cases based and procedural rights. so the questions would be more about well, you know was the door locked or not because that would be about whether it's breaking and entering or whether they're just entered and you get this more sort of formalized right space system that starts 15 a lot of these local cases and the written law and particular kinds of written laws that are taught in law schools that are then elevated in this period as being the primary source of law that's part of the, you know, the developments that are happening as well. so, you know, the reason why we go there is because of this period where that kind of law acquires more meaning and authority and it starts taking it more space and people start arguing that the written texts are actually really more important than the practices themselves and we've forgotten then that those practices used to have real legal traction and they still do in a lot of ways because even to this day, you know brown people to education is a great example. it's about practice people are constantly in supreme court cases talking about us supreme court case is talking about practice history. what used to be originalism is in fact about you know this idea about what the practices actually were in the past, so we still also give practice a lot of space and law and we don't always i think recognize that but we don't see the real space it had in the 19th century and we don't see it as creating law in the way that it did in that period thank you. you tell many stories. in the book the very diverse set of characters you end the book with perhaps the best-known name of mary todd lincoln if you could just say just a few words about that example and what it reveals and how and why you end the book with her experience. yeah. it was a revelation for me that mary todd lincoln produced a national crisis by trying to sell her clothes that she wore while she was, you know, the president. i'm like, wow, so this to me is this example of how clothing loses it's legal valence and becomes more like simply a consumer item and if it's a consumer item that is simply your second skin and especially in the post emancipation period to sell your second skin is akin to selling yourself and this is the way that then you know merit i think is just completely ridicule than the national press for she's such bad page. she's selling herself. herself. she's like a prostitute. and in fact always sold their clothes. this was their capital. this is what they have entire secondhand clothing store set up. i most main streets in america to handle exactly this kind of thing. and yeah it is cast in a very different way as a consumer good not something that is legally legible and legally important for people to do and the real important part of this as well. is that caught in the midst of all of this is a list of calculate. he was married totally consumede and she has an entire business set up which is not just being a seamstress but it is designing and fashioning clothing and making it for you know, washington's easily women so her carefully design garments are then held up ridicule by the entire country and then basically all of the labor and the skill that was brought into that is also erased as these goods become simply consumer goods. why don't you sell your old clothes just go buy new ones who has old clothes anyway, and she never recovered. luckily, she didn't get her business back. it was just erasure of her her skill and also the legal asked the legal qualities of clothing too that you know made them actually forms the currency in capital that women sold all the time and the poor people encycloped people had sold all the time and so it is this really sad. i need to the story too because you know, this is supposed to emancipation period this is when we're going to enact the 14th amendment. nobody gets rid of coverture at that point married on this property acts do not get rid of coventure and elizabeth keckley is going to be in a very different position than african-american men in this period and then even then african american men. well they do is like dylan penningross new book is going to be about all this. there's still is a lot of ability for african americans to claim property, but we've not fully considered the ways that men and women's relationship to property is very different based on the different trajectory of the extension of rights, but then also the erasure of these other ways of claiming property and megan this may get back to your point as well is that we're so accustomed to thinking this property is an individual possession that we also can't imagine different ways of owning using regulating property that it could be for the public good that it could be about communities of people that they're different ways and they're different ways of making claims on the productive capacity of that property to beyond simply those of individuals and absolute ownership that we imagine today. so thank you. i unfortunately have to draw this to a close because our designated time is up, but i do want to express my sincere. thanks to laura marthamy name i. i'm a professor of american religious history at yale university and it's my privilege to serve as moderator for this panel today. this session asks how national state and local governments have sought to manage religious diversity throughout american history. together these panelists tell a story of how us state actors working within seemingly secular realms like us military governance health care and taxation created an unstated religious policy that defined some religions as marginal. and others as mainstream in three different case studies, they show how religious communities have sometimes challenged this policy and h

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Laura Edwards Only The Clothes On Her Back 20220724

history seminar to order. i want to welcome everyone to this seminar subtitled historical perspectives on international and national affairs this afternoon. we will be focusing on a new book by the princeton historian laura edwards titled only the clothes on her back clothing and the hidden history of power in the 19th century united states published by oxford university, press in late, february and joining us this afternoon as discussions are martha jones of john's hopkins and megan sweeney of the university of michigan. i'm eric arneson from the george washington university co-chair of the washington history seminar along with my colleague christian osterman of the wilson center who cannot be here today. the washington industry seminar is a collaborative non-partisan venture of the woodrow wilson center's history and public policy program and the american historical associations national history center. and for over the past decade the seminar has been meeting weekly and pre-covid times in person at the wilson center and since the pandemic well, here in the virtual realm behind the scenes two people make these seminars possible pete bierstecker of the wilson center and rachel wheatley of the national history center, and i'd like to thank institutional supporters the george washington university department of history in particular as well as a number of anonymous individual donors. and as i say every week, we invite you to join their ranks. on the logistics front, please note. today's session is being recorded and can soon be found on our institutions respective websites and crucially when we get to the question and answer section of the webinar, we ask those with questions to use the raise hand function on zoom or the q&a function not chat and to those watching on facebook live. you can email questions to rachel wheatley at our weekly our wh e a t l e y at historians.org, and we will call on as many folks as we can we prefer for you to raise hand and pose the question yourself. otherwise, i have to pose it for you. all right with that it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker this afternoon laura edwards, who is the class of 1921 bicentennial professor in the history of american law and liberty in history department at princeton university. her work focuses on the legal history of the 19th century united states with an emphasis on people's interactions with the law and the legal system. she's the author of a number of books a legal history of the civil war and reconstruction a nation of rights published in 2015, and the people and their peace legal culture and the transformation of inequality in the post-revolutionary south 2000. nine a book that was awarded the american historical associations littleton griswold prize for the best book and law in society and the southern historical associations charles sydney price for the best book in southern history. she's received fellowship from the newberry library the national humanity center national endowment for the humanities the acls the bogan high foundation and the american bar foundation. and today we're delighted that she's here speaking about her most recent book only the clothes on her back clothing and the hidden history of power in the 19th century united states. laura the screen is all yours. welcome. to the washington history seminar thank you so much for having me and thank you for the lovely introduction and thank you to megan and martha for coming today as well. so i'm gonna start with a story because the book is full of stories. so i'm gonna begin with six women in a sheet. so all of these women and the sheet appeared in new york city's municipal court in 1804, and actually it was the sheet that started at all which is apropos because this book is about a textiles. so one of the women sarah allingham charged another woman judith friel was stealing the sheet. although these charges really that's the oversimplified this whole situation. so judith frio was a washer woman who just happened to have the sheet amongst the dirty laundry. she was collecting that day. so imagine her consternation where sarah ellingham ran out into the street way later grabbed up her bundles and began rummaging through them and the city streets loudly actually remington three of them. so when allingham found which she insisted was hershey she announced her discovery and marched off with it to file charges in the new york. city's mayor's court and judicial was following in her way. so once in court, it became clear that judith friel was in fact really transporting that she to her house to be washed. it was another woman sally riley who had taken it nearly a year earlier. so riley had been sold it to rosanna morara. this is getting confusing who's bundle of laundry was the one that contained the sheet so both of those women joined the other two making four women and a sheet in court then two more women appeared as witnesses to support roseanna moraris claims that she had purchased a sheep from sally riley bringing us to six women and a sheep. so ultimately the court listen to all this they awarded the sheet to rose anniversara. so case closed but actually not really robert given conventional historical wisdom. this dispute never really should have made it to court at all. these were poor women. they're squabbling over a cheap sheet and more to the point. they were married women encumbered by coverture. a collection of legal principles limited wives legal rights and subordinated them to their husbands among other things coverage of prohibited women from owning property and prosecuting court cases in their own name more than that covered sugar gave husband's legal rights to property in their wives and property that their wives bought into marriage and anything that they acquired afterward by those rules. sarah allingham could not own a she let alone prosecutor case to claim ownership. yet and sarah allenham's case officials accepted both the women's claims two property and their access to the legal system. they did ultimately give a nod to coverture's rules. they identified the prosecutor as allen hans husband attributing ownership of the sheet to him, but after filling in the obligatory boxes officials dispense with this fiction that the matter at anything due to the husbands. in fact, they were not in court at all for the court officials as well as the women involve. the question was which married woman possessed the sheet not whether a married woman could possess it. now to make things more interesting here this case was not at all unusual between the revolution and the civil war courts the united states regularly dealt with similar cases cases involving claims by people on the legal margins often people without property rights at all to clothing related accessories such as hats and handkerchiefs as well as uncut cloth and bed linens. so how could people without property rights claim property? and that is the question that i explore in this book only the closer back. the answers i argue lie in the legal qualities that attach to clothing so people without property rights including married women and enslaved people relied on long-standing legal principles. that attach clothing to the person who wore it, but they did not stop there through use. they expanded those legal principles to make legal claims to all kinds of textiles and accessories that they made or that simply passed you their hands because it was textiles and something related to cloth they could keep this they could make legal claims to it and then they went further using the security provided by law to turn these goods into currency into capital and collateral for credit which gave them an entry point into governing institutions and the economy. people like sarah allen ham. we're not on the outside looking in as we have usually assumed they actually use textiles to include themselves in governing institutions and the economy and they really made law this way insisting on the recognition of commonly held legal principles that unlike property rights app. broadly to everyone so the first of our sarah ellington's she was not really that unusual once you start looking for textiles you realize that they're everywhere people made them. they sold them they talked about them. they thought about them all the time yet scholars from period period between the revolution and the civil war have tended to kind of walk by such property and assume that it was more like consumer goods and instead focus on the kind of property land enslaved property commodities owned by elite white men the minority of the population the textiles in this period were not just consumer goods. they too were valuable property and valuable property that unlike other forms of property. most americans could legally own. so by the time of the revolution the accountant the economics of textiles had hit really kind of a sweet spot would have been luxury goods before we're now more affordable and more available and not so cheap is to be completely worthless quality mattered and people knew quality broad range of americans including the -- and slave could spot find linens silk wool at 10 paces and they could assess trimming such as ribbon and bridge just as accurately and that knowledge was i'm prominent display in theft cases across the united states parties to these cases were describe coughing clothing in great detail distinguishing cheap goods from expensive ones and rattling up information about fiber content colors and patterns that most people today would never notice let alone remember and all the details function like figures on a banknote actually in fact textiles were preferable to things notes for most for many americans. the possession of banknotes was suspect for poor people and people without property rights. the presumption was that they should not have them and so if they did it was suspicious but not so with the possession of textiles because the legal principles of associated with them gave people claims to them textiles also had economic advantages over banknotes because they actually held their value more reliably the material qualities of textiles suited them for use this currency as well. there was considerable consensus as to their value. they were extremely liquid and they came in different denominations, which was handy. they ran the gamut from handkerchiefs, which you could used by small things and big expensive links of cloth, which you could use to buy more expensive things. when people traded in these goods, they were not bartering they valued items and pounds or dollars and then bought and sold accordingly and leverage the value of textiles as people did with other property pawning them lending them or saving them to fund future ventures. the result was this vast secondary market, which provided not just access to goods, but also a means to circulate them. so this part of the market was kind of everywhere and nowhere in particular it included palm brookers auctioneers pedalers grocers tavern keepers tailors dressmakers unlicensed shotkeepers vendors and open air markets as well as individuals who just sold on the streets and from their homes. and to say that this market was underground or informal actually misconstrues, its institutional underpinnings, which depended on widely recognized enforced rules ownership was established through relationship to the goods as witnessed by other people through possession through use and display wearing was a really good way to establish ownership. so was buying and selling in public. sarah allingham ultimately lost her she to rose annamarara because rosanna marra had exactly the kind of evidence that proved possession and took the place of the information. i received she had witnesses who could describe the property and value it connected to the purported owner provide the data purchase verify the transaction and she actually had the sheet in her possession. there were also rules for exchange people pond cloth, or they wanted it back. they loaded if they did not in pawning people used clothing and other textiles is collateral against which they borrow a pain fees which was interest each week people charged with f actually would point out that they had pawned the goods which meant they didn't steal them because they could always get them back. they had not yet reduced them to their possession but loans were different with loans the owner expected the return of the textiles value plus interest not the goods themselves which declined in value and use over time. nobody wants the handkerchief that you just somebody else blew their nose and back. so the terms were then agreed to at the time of the loan verbally. and this is actually what sarah allenhan's case was all about the testimony that she had blown the testimony suggest that she had actually loaned the sheet to her neighbor sally riley not because riley was in desperate need of badlands, but because both women were leveraging the sheets value riley then sold it to rosanna marra, which was accepted practice and did not negate her obligation to repay the value of the sheet. it was only after alling him believe that riley had reneged of the loan that she took matters into her own hand and sees the sheet hoping to recruit some of her loss. then she went to court because it was never just about the sheet the rules of exchange really mattered those expectations of enforcement ran deep in kept local courts in both rural and urban areas very very busy. it is really remarkable that people without property rights felt confident in pursuing cases that looked an awful lot like assertions of property rights even more remarkable is responsive local officials who dutifully sorted through the evidence involving sheets shifts. tips shirts and shoes to figure out whose property was whose the legal qualities of textiles though only went so far and the book traces the trajectory of their use their eyes. they're used in decline and over time. people without property rights could not make claims through civil actions the usual means of reclaiming property through debt cases for instance because such suits required the possession of rights. even people with rights but on the legal margins because of racing class found civil actions difficult because they did not have the resources and the kinds of evidence necessary to produce to pursue them. so officials then shifted claims to prep to public law where they could be tried as criminal offenses. usually theft the point in this area of law was to write wrongs to put things back where they belong to make things right and that included sheets. so in this body of law court officials could act on complaints by people without the rights necessary in civil cases by treating these matters as things involving the public order, so they're a violation of the public order not a of their individual rights. matters involving claims to textiles also fit really well within this area of law because the legal principles that allowed everyone to owed and trade these goods we're so well established and established through practice as part of the public order. prosecution affirm those practices and restored the property to the places where they belong without recognizing the rights of the individuals involved now this provided some flexibility for people to make legal claims claims, but it also came with real costs the legal charge theft. was it convenience, but it made the very property claims of people without strong claims to property rights. it made all of those claims to property different and it made them also seem illegitimate. in fact, it criminalized them. somebody could own the property, but another person was declared a criminal the implications while ominous in the decades following the revolution would become inescapable as mid-century approached and the balance of legal author. to shifting towards those areas of law that focus more on the rights of individuals. now writes had definite advantages over textiles reclaims to textiles state in particular contexts with the people who knew about them the people who had testify about them the people who could show that they own them rightspace claims to property traveled freely with individuals had rights, they could claim property across all the mess of jurisdictional lines in the federal system within states from state to state from states to territories and pretty much in all bodies of laws. well, now this kind of portability mattered in a world where people moved and goods also flowed freely. in fact rights particularly property rights for this rare constant across all the jurisdictional lines of local state and federal. but that situation was challenging for merchants who were working across all of these jurisdictional lines, and it's so they needed some sort of constant that allowed them to to do business and in do this make sense similar kinds of claims across these church just from the lines, but the problems were awesome more fundamental here. so all of these laws all of these jurisdictions determined a person status and how they can move through the world. so people of african descent notably. we're presumed to be enslaved in some states and free and others. so this is a problem. no wonder then that the elimination of all of these restrictions and rights particularly property rights, we can key political issues for women for african americans the decades leading up to the civil war right to the things that allow people status also to have constancy across all this massive jur. the lines the problem though. is that the extension of rights did not allow for the kind of claims made with textiles nor did they eliminate the other legal restrictions that kept all women many african americans and even poor white men from claiming and using rights. textiles had given these people legal cover, but without them they were vulnerable. now to be sure the extension of rights helped. in fact, it was impossible to navigate either the legal order or the economy without them but the possession of rights only went so far as long as other kinds of restrictions remain in place. so by the late 19th century actually as the book argues many americans had little more than the close in their backs, but that property had become pretty flimsy legal coverings by that. and the people on the legal margins though, and this is i think really the point of the book did not just wait around for rights to be extended to them. they use the legal materials. they had at hand throughout the 19th century to work toward a world where claim their labor possess property and define their own destinies and those legal materials were literally the clothes on their backs. thank you very much laura edwards. our first discussion this afternoon is professor martha s jones, who is the society of black alumni presidential professor professor of history and a professor at the snf agora institute at the johns hopkins university. she is a legal and cultural historian. who's work examines. how blat americans have shaped the story of american democracy. professor jones is the author of vanguard. how black women broke barriers won the vote and insisted on a quality for all published in 2020 and was selected as one of times 100 must read for that year. she is also the author of the award-winning birthright citizens a history of race and rights in antebellum america published in 2018 all bound up together the woman questioned in african-american public culture 1830 to 1900 published in 2007, and she's co-editor of toward an intellectual history of black women published in 2015 prior to her academic career. she was a public interest to litigator in new york city, and she currently serves on the boards on the society of american historians national women's history museum the us capital historical society johns hopkins university, press the general of african-american history and slavery and abolition. professor jones martha welcome to the seminar screen is yours. thanks very much, eric. thank you to the washington history seminar and the aha in the wilson center for convening us today. and i want to start by saying very distinctly remember. when i said almost simultaneously to laura edwards and to making sweeney both that they had to meet one another they had to trade notes here were these two extraordinary scholars with such deep engagement and commitment to the craft and to the culture and to the everyday life of textiles even in their own lives. that means that this afternoon. i'm a bit of a happy interloper. i can barely thread a needle and i need to read the label to distinguish between rayon and silk. and still from both of you. i've learned so much about my own archives and the women who vomit who i have encountered there pilfering and thieving and secreting and snatching and otherwise claiming fabric and clothes that were not their own. if in local courthouses, these were women deemed petty thieves and on occasion actually not so petty. it was in conversation with laura edwards and through her work that has become this magnificent book only the clothes on her back that i was required to return to those archives and read them a new. so, thank you laura for the book for your mentorship and for your example. it has been truly transformative in my work. so when i say this book is much anticipated. well, that's an understatement i guess but many of us have been treated to parts of this work over the years at conferences and workshops and through comments on panels all of which suggested the degree to which this would be path breaking and so here we are to offer congratulations and some comment. one of the things that's remarkable about this book is the degree to which historians of capitalism of early america's many legalities along with historians of textiles trade the economic lives of women and more will be fascinated and changed by this study. laura edwards has brought her vast and field defining expertise on the quotidian and yet profoundly consequential dynamics of local legal culture into conversation with the far-reaching. even global dynamics that defined the production trade and the market of textiles and early america. these latter what in my work might be abstract matters on it might cause the eyes of cultural historians like me to glaze over but laura edwards of course has stories as you've already heard this afternoon one of the strengths of this work is it's insistence and it's deep capacity to bear out the claim that local people ordinary americans even those marginalized and formal law. we're connected to global markets and changed market forces in their own lives and by their own terms. it's a work that takes us back to dylan penningroth's important enduring claims of kinfolk. as i read this again. i remembered these are histories that take new and even unorthodox points of view that change our thinking no longer are ordinary people merely those buffeted about by capitalism's market forces their agents of law and lawmaking and while laura might see it. otherwise for me. this is the best of the approach to legal history pioneered by folks like dirk hartog and exemplified in his article pigs and positivism now many decades ago, the law was what people even ordinary people made it out to be. it was the contest that they waged the debates they weighed in on all that rather than the text alone is for us the history of law. one of the things i think readers might not anticipate is how this book is also an elegant primer in the history of fabrics and textiles. they're crafting production styling and more. such an insider's perspective could require a glossary in a less well-written book but here the value of textiles comes plain as we learn what it took to render them as articles of practical adornment. pretentious beauty and even class and status this foundation is what permits us to accept how such materials also became economic instruments currency capital and credit. any historian who has read a will or a state inventory has noted a family squabble over garments and fabric or like me marvel that how many cases on a 19th century local courthouse criminal docket mentioned the theft of textiles and clothes by someone who had no apparent use for them. finally has an answer to the questions these archives present. as laura edwards explains these items were property unlike any other and their value extended far beyond how they adorned oneself one's dependence or one's home textiles were property of a distinct sword so much so that even americans shunted to the margins of legal culture could claim their places and their property in court houses nearly uncanny success. this is a book of consequence for historians of law broadly be they scholars of latin america africa and asia. or those across many us subfields including african-american native american women's history. so many of us are at work on the intersection of ordinary people and global markets, and we see our archives in new through this work. i do have a sort of i don't know rambly questioned for laura edwards, and i'll try it here and hope we'll get to it in discussion and it really is about and laura you'll recognize this question because it's not the first time i've asked it of you about scale or the register of this work on the on the one hand. those of us who know your work are not surprised how you render this history as profoundly intimate right shaped by the rules and the logic that were local so that we see how ordinary people's engagements with markets that were far-flung actually played out on the ground in lives. and then the other hand there, is that other scale. this is a history that plays out on a world scale across europe across asia across the americas knit together by movements ocean season rivers, and i'm interested still in how you think about the choices of emphasis how you help us sort of stay steady as we're asked and you demand of us to think in these varied frames folks will encounter those references to india and china in the middle east that help us. i think to anchor those kinds of questions and for me only the clothes on her back enjoins with scholars who have importantly taken the history of women in textiles in particular beyond the history of labor beyond the history of fashion and adornment. to find at least political though. i think half-breaking here is finding not only the political but the legal meaning of those actions and transactions. i'm interested in intrigued by how native american historians will also find their way to and into this book, um, thinking about native americans own local legal cultures. yes, but the central role of textiles textile making fashioning and more in native american culture and they will figure here. so i think that's my time, but i do again want to say thank you to everybody for convenience. and especially thank you to laura edwards for this extraordinary book. it's really an honor to be here with you. thank you, martha. laura would you like to respond to that question that rather grand question that was just posed before we move on. sure sure. scale scale i had a really hard time with this book because on the one hand i started researching in the south thinking that a regional frame was the appropriate one and then it became very clear that region did not explain what i was looking for states did not explain what i was looking at actually and with this weird at least to me thinking at that time similarities between what was going on and like the new york city mayor's court in charleston, south carolina and south carolina up country and north carolina in pennsylvania, and it was strange to me because these were really very local jurisdictions that i was looking at, but the rules were operating when it came to textiles in a very similar way and i was like scratch in my head. i don't understand this and yet it became there when i started thinking about the global textile market and i started reading back in time and thinking about the way that in fact these goods have been moving across borders before there were even national borders right and that there's also real their legal principles that are developing relationship to the goods attach the goods and start to travel with them. so i had to really think outside our usual framework for understanding law right and policy. we usually think within a national framework and it was not the national framework that was operative here was actually a global market global trade in the principles that developed through them through those dynamics and then that spread to people that people picked up and used and so all of these legal principles kind of travel with the textiles themselves, but then they get out of root down and local areas people know them but to make them work it requires a lot of local knowledge. so you get the general principles, which is, you know, along the lines of the things that clothing attaches to you and if you have it you probably own it, but then in order at that you have to go very local because you know, which shirt belongs to which person is actually about a personal relationship to that particular item. so it is at once global and local and then part of the story is this development of the state law, but then kind of a national legal culture based on rights that circulates across all of these local jurisdictions that start to developing an intervening with all of this as well. so i'm trying to handle all of this scales at once and keep the focus, you know on the textiles, but as they move around through these jurisdictions as well. thank you very much before we move on just a reminder to those of you who are watching. you can participate as well. we have a number of people who have posed questions in the q&a function, but you could also use the raise hand function which has the advantage of i get to call on you and if you unmute you get to pose your question directly so you can start getting in the queue now if you so desire just an fyi. our second discussing this afternoon is megan sweeney the arthur f turnow associate professor of english afro-american and african studies and women's and gender studies at the university of michigan in ann arbor. she earned a ba in the history and literatures of religions from northwestern university and 1989 and a phd in literature from duke university in 2004. our publications include an award-winning monograph reading is my window books and the art of reading in women's prison published in 2010 and edited collection the story within us women prisoners reflect on reading 2012 and a collection of clothing related lyric essays called mendings, which is forthcoming from duke university, press in 2000 23 at the university of michigan megan sweeney currently serves as associate chair and as graduate studies in the women's and gender studies program as well as director of undergraduate studies in the department of english language and literature and as director of the hopwood program megan, welcome to the washington history seminar. thank you so much eric for that and i just want to say it's such an honor for me to participate in this conversation with both of you laura and martha, and i'm so grateful to have been brought together by this wonderful book. i remember when martha first told me about you laura and it's been so fun to dig into your work as you say about yourself and your acknowledgments. laura textiles have always distracted me too, and i want to begin by sharing two quick anecdotes that came to mind as i was reading only the clothes on her back. first in your acknowledgments you reference mulberry silks and carrboro, north carolina. i visited that shop about 35 years ago and keenly recall buying one yard of gorgeous fabric because that was all that i could afford but i was determined to design and sew a shirt with that amount. second when my husband and i got married many years ago my family gave us a spinning wheel and a loom as wedding gifts and we signed up for a spinning class while we were in graduate school, but ended up having to drop the class because the spinning was so difficult and we didn't have time to practice. i created some very lumpy strands that broke about every 30 seconds so i can attest to the considerable skill and dexterity and experience required for spinning and i want to say hats off to the many spinners you honor in your book. in terms of comments and questions about only the close on her back. i'd like to dwell for a minute on broader dimensions of the book that i especially admire and then get into some details with an observation and a few questions. throughout my reading i kept marveling at what a lucid compelling and lively account you offer of dense concepts and complex examples. i teach a course called threads what does clothing have to do with race culture politics and the environment and i'm so excited to incorporate more insights from your book into that course. i love your use of the weaving terms warp and weft to describe how people without strong claims to rights or property participated in constructing the country's legal fabric if we think of the warp as the laws that restricted most americans legal status and the weft as the textiles that people made legally meaningful. i love how you've organized each chapter around a particular historical case paired with a central concept such as currency credit or erasure those concepts provide such a helpful guide for readers. i love your manifest appreciation for the everyday textile artists confined to the margins of history and you're appreciation of their creations, which is evident when you describe for instance the rich details about preparing flax or fulling wool or when you rest on the bit of ribbon or lace that's in the story and i love the moments in which you dwell on the delightful language of the world. you conjure much of which is lost to us today. ali bally's carrie dairies do foodies gorgaons hums and iseries i love to your flashes of wit and humor throughout the book starting on the first page with your hopes that elizabeth billings donned more appropriate footwear for her attempted escape than the floral silk heals that she stole from her mistress. before i ask my questions, i'd like to share one connection that i made in reading that i was really struck by. you draw attention to the insidious ways in which women's household production was devalued as merely domestic labor and was artificially and erroneously separated from market-oriented production. this point reminded me of a wonderful documentary. called angry and nook created by aletheia arnacook buril in 2016 the film focuses on efforts to ban commercial seal hunting and those efforts have been absolutely devastating for inuit people in the canadian arctic inuit women process and prepare the skins for sale in their homes, but they're livelihood and the community survival is totally dependent on the commercial trade in seal skins. so women's textile related domestic work is part of the commercial market but the inuit are repeatedly told by activists that they are protected from negative effects of the ban by an exception that allows inuits to hunt seals for personal use the activists refusal to recognize the embracation of inuit women's domestic and commercial work struck me as a contemporary version of the illegible nature of some women's commercial textile work that you describe so beautifully in your book. my first question has a long windup. so please bear with me throughout your book you maintain a wonderful balance. i think between on the one hand recognizing the concrete social economic and legal inequalities that shape the daily lives of those without strong claims to rights or property and on the other hand illuminating the creative resourceful and often very moving ways. in which these ordinary people exercised agency in the midst of constraint in terms of concrete limits. you remind us that textiles under wrote the slave trade you emphasize as you've mentioned today that asserting property claims to textiles criminalized a huge range of property transactions as theft that it was a fragile and fleeting form of agency that was unequally available to those on the margins given race and gender restrictions, and then it did nothing to challenge the foundational racial gender and class inequities of the social order but at the same time your book highlights so many savvy important forms of quotidian agency including as one example the sutterfuge that people performed in accounting for time and labor that did not belong to them according to civil law either by committing nothing to writing or an example that i loved by tracking things in diaries or recipe books or commonplace books to prevent the property from being merged with a husband's property or an employer's property. and a second example you talk about how women's quilting circles and sewing circles and dress fittings. where as much about creating and maintaining property claims as they were about sociability or charity or the pulling of labor. your account also unsettles and challenges so many ideas that have long seemed like givens such as that married white women and enslaved people could not act as merchants or manufacturers or that people on society's margins could never expect or demand recourse to the law or that written codification of rights-based law represents unequivocal progress. and in unsettling these givens you vividly evoke realities that seem quite distant or even unimaginable today. such as in this is i think something that martha was invoking a concept of law as practice based in the customs of local communities and known widely by all as opposed to our concept of law as universal principles based in the rights of individuals, which write residing books and are is only available the trained few. if you emphasize the idea of local courts that had strong connections to the communities in which they were situated and that revolved around relationships. you emphasize the idea that public law incorporated those without rights and to its basic workings because they were part of the public body. you emphasize the idea that relationships a wee made it possible for individuals on the legal margins to act as an eye who could make claims to property. you emphasize the idea of commercial transactions as matters of relationship instead of distanced exchanges removed from social contexts. and you emphasize the idea that most people paid keen attention to the intimate details of clothing and thought of long-lasting well-made clothing as one of the most important forms of property investment. here finally is my question. so keeping in mind your admirable refusal to romanticize the past that you conjure. i'm wondering if in the course of your research you ever found glimmers of possibility or food for thought that seemed helpful for reimagining some of our current givens as a reader. i found it helpful and i dare say even hopeful. to be reminded of that ideas that now seem immutable and irrefutable are time bound and potentially ephemeral. so i found myself wondering what we might learn from the worlds you evoke in your book about contemporary possibilities for things like secondhand markets and exchanges or local economies and mutual aid or forms of local restorative even transformative justice or ways to rest clothing from its participation in exploitative labor practices and environmental devastation. so i'm wondering to what extent if any did you encounter ideas in your research that sparked your imagination about other ways that we might live in relation to clothing and also in relation to each other so very long and winding question, but but i hope it landed at a comprehensible place. right and i have one more question too. but if if it's helpful to go there first. sure, that that's that's a huge question megan and what my goodness yes, you this book is i found other people in this book. i really liked them and i found them. puzzling but i found them so incredibly admirable if they're creativity of the ways that they reimagined how they could work with the tools that they had and in this instance. it's these, you know, principles attached to textiles, but the textiles themselves they kind of reimagined who they were through their material where their relationship the relationship to these material goods and the ways that they could make these goods themselves too. it's it put not only legal agency but economic agency in their hands in a way that i found refreshing given the general presumptions that these people are kind of buffeted about by economic change and by you know the laws, country which simply exploited them and give them very little room from maneuver. what i found really fascinating was some of the things that you were pointing out with like the wii and i this idea that in fact you had to have a group of people who could support you that this was more important than this idea of an individual right for people who don't have power and so this book really made me think very clearly and kind of critically in ways that i hadn't before about the difference between power and rights. i think that right now we tend to presume that if you have right you have power and it was very clear from doing the research for this book that in this period that if you had rights, sometimes that wasn't really very useful because you didn't have the power to use them and in other instances, you know, you just didn't have rights, but you could have considerable power actually, so it made me separate these two things and textiles is the way of rethinking this right so that you know a wealthy woman who owned all kinds of clothing, but then all kinds of bed linens and textiles. she would have a group of people who knew that who could you know, actually attach those goods to her, but without that group of people those goods might move over into her husband's possessions because she was married to him coverture would place valuable property into the ambit of her husband's legal claims, but she needed that group of people around her to make sure that those that property stayed with her and this was even more important for enslaved women for instance, too, and i have a an example in the book polly who actually has a small business of our own spinning thread, but people see probably spinning the thread they see her dying the thread they know that it's her thread all of those people who know that about her they're able to help buttress her claims to this so it's not her right? it's the power that she has through those relationships and it's this creation. be that is really important. this is also important for mothers and daughters. so we've seen people have hope chests. i know this my mother had a hope chest actually my grandmother had a hope chest. hope chests are full of like bed linens and other kinds of textiles usually but i hope chest we imagine is oh, those are the kinds of just the things that women get when they get married and there's just, you know to help her set up the household and that's it. but actually this is a transfer of capital from mothers to daughters. so mothers who often control the labor of their daughters would allow the daughters to claim the fruits of their own labor what they produced in terms of textiles or sometimes what they made in other kinds of productive activities, but then purchase textiles they then took those put those textiles and trunks which actually are legal containers to the limit property. and then the daughters had capital that they could keep in the marriage. so this is not just consumer goods. this is actually capital that they have that can take a woman through difficult times and would be also removed from her husband's creditors. it's like, oh my gosh, this is actually a wee again of the mother the daughter and then people who know about this property creating secure claims to this really valuable form of capital. so it's interesting for me to think about power that way rather than right, but then think about power and creative ways to for today, right because we assume that rights will solve a whole range of problems in our society, but it may be that rights have less power to resolve those issues then this collective sense of these relationships we have to other people this sense of communal action of the ideas the public good and the power that you can get through exactly those kinds of relationships that we may have. too much in individuals and not seeing how all of this relationships and actually legal principles that attach to goods and that are created through those relationships how important those are. so that was a long-winded answer to your question, and i think there are other things in here too that i find really interesting like skill and the importance of skill and understanding value, but i'll leave it there and you ask your other question. megan back to you. wonderful. thank you. my second question has a much shorter windup, but it has two quick parts as a non-historian but in many ways i want to be historian. i found myself thinking a lot about method as i was reading your book and the first part of my question is given the many silences and gaps in the archive. i'd love to hear more about when and how you realized that you had a new different story to tell how did the story coalesce for you since so much of it goes against the grain of received wisdom? and the second part is i'd love to hear more about how you taught yourself to read. the extant materials many of which require very different kinds of literacy. i'm thinking for instance of how elizabeth bagby recorded as memoranda the transactions related to textiles that she actually produced and traded. or how rebecca kate recorded her her own work as a wife who did uncompensated domestic labor and also the wage work performed by her unmarried sister. how did you acquire the literacy for parsing these practices for what they were given how little they have been visible in the record of explanation. yeah, so elizabeth bagby for everybody else who hasn't read the book elizabeth. bagby has a memorandum book. actually. it's it's called a memorandum book. it's called a commonplace book in the archives. it's not really a commonplace book. it's just what it's labeled and she has all of her weaving accounts in this book and at the beginning though, she has a quote and i'm gonna forget the exact quote but it's basically for all the goods that belong to the household. you must keep careful account, but for the goods cheaper to produce within yourself, and essentially the goods are belong to her. it's best to keep memoranda, and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that for i don't know several years and then i was like, oh my gosh, she's actually talking about household accounts the goods that she produces as a wife under curvature that belonged to her husband and their creditors and then the memoranda is a way of separating out her goods and so you have account books and you have accounts because i've been looking at account books and puzzling over when women appear when they don't appear when enslave people appear when they don't appear. and it occurred to me. it's like oh those are legal records. nobody uses account books in this period to like track economic production or figure out you know, how to better your business. it is a legal record to determine who's in debt to you and who's not and how much they owe so women don't appear in there because it's a legal form where it's unnecessary generally for married women to appear or enslave people to appear because you can't sue them in civil court, which is where like account looks matter. memoranda is something else you take it in a different form. it looks different the material qualities of it are different. and so that's a memorandum. it's not an account, which means that you've separated out your property and that the memoranda establishes your connection to it, but it doesn't give creditors your husband or their creditors any claim to that. and so, you know, i don't know it's these moments where you have this tension where something doesn't make sense and it's those weird sentences and that was one of them. it's like best to keep memoranda. what does that mean and then all of a sudden we sort of when the context of the larger like account book universe it starts making more sense and then once you get that little kind of clue there just like oh then the whole chapter starts unfolding or several those chapters starting unfolding with looking at how people do track their accounts and they attract accounts verbally, which have a different kind of legal resonance. they attract counts through the material goods themselves people would bring in for instance if you accused of stealing address and then bring in the dress and say see, i didn't steal it like why would you do that? that's not very like credible evidence to me. you could still bring in the stolen dress, right? but this is all part of a logic whereby if you are claiming like your connection to it you're showing your connection to a material good then that's a way of showing that you in fact do own it and have legal claim to it. you would never bring in something that you had dolan that you don't have legal claim to because you would be hiding it and you would have actually like put it into the secondary market and got rid of it as fast as possible right to have claimed it to have kept it and then to wear it shows that you actually have this legal claim to it. so you have to start then piecing together the pieces of evidence that don't make sense and then try to like create the pattern. so i just feel like this is a puzzle and you get little pieces of the puzzle and it's gonna put this down. this is a corner piece. i think oh it is a corner piece then all the sudden other things start taking shape and with this it was really like seeing a world that i couldn't i didn't notice there and i found it really kind of exciting to piece together for instance the accounting and the ways that people are trying to hide their whole economic world because if they put it in writing and put it in certain forms, it's going to move into the hands of their masters their employers. and their fathers and i found this particularly compelling with enslaved people who are constantly hiding the forms of accounting and yet constantly depending on all of this relationships that people seeing their goods. so it's utterly public and yet we can no longer see it as historians because the evidence was kept in a way that is not saved and not visible and for a reason right so we have all of the written evidence of the economic world of the men with property who could work in civil law because that is in writing and it was saved in particular kinds of forms that now in archives and so we think that's the only thing and yet there's this whole other world out there that was documented in very different ways and we don't see that anymore to me that gets back to your first question too. it's like there are there's a whole world there that we're unaware of that we could still draw on because the possibilities to imagine economic exchange power people's relationships a lot. it's much broader in our past than what we had assumed. thank you. it's wonderful. thank you. we're now going to open this up to those in the audience. we have a hand patiently waiting to be called upon sonia michelle, you know the routine please unmute. join the conversation thank you, eric. and thank you very much laura for what sounds like a fascinating book. i ordered it while you were talking. i am. sorry. i missed the first few minutes, but um, i ordered it as soon as i heard you're talking about it. um, first of all, just let me start with a little anecdote perhaps you read in the new york times last week. there was an article about the ukrainian air force and there was one line that struck me where they described the wife of one of the pilots and he said and the article said she spends her days weaving homemade camouflage nets for the ukrainian army. that phrase was just so incredibly evocative. i don't know if you know i've abandoned history and i'm now become an artist and i immediately started working on a collage that to that evoke to me what it what the camouflage that's must look like these homemade camouflage nuts, but i do have a question or a sort of serious question. um, and i'm sorry, i didn't hear the sort of a whole overview of your book. so maybe you've already touched on this but what is the relationship between i mean throughout the 19th century what? production weaving and so forth was becoming increasingly industrialized and i wonder if that's a thread or a theme through the book and if so how that relates to this but obviously seems to be another focus of yours. that is the the individual and handmade production of textiles and then sort of going in a somewhat different direction what i was doing the wash this morning and i was thinking about laundry. what is the relationship between laundry textile production on and laundry on the one hand and textile production and women's dress making and tailoring on the other and the sort of gendering of all of those activities. i wonder if you talk about all of that in the book. and yeah, so let me do laundry first. i'd like laundering is how you rehabilitate textiles. so in laundry is really important because as actually megan i believe was saying it's a having well made. fitted clothes that are well-kept. it's like this is really important to people this is not just sort of like poor people do this because it's really meaningful to them. they're not doing it simply to you know, like to try to aspire to middle class values or anything. this is this is something that is incredibly important because it is supposed to clothing represent your inner self. and is your your inner self is expressed through your outer layers. and so this is about, you know, making a statement about your character and it is seen as really important to like tend to that and so it's not just a matter of having expensive clothing. it's a matter of keeping it up and making sure it's well fitted and well-tended and so laundry is a part of that and poor people go to extraordinary links to wander. listen to have white and then in a particular caffeine brown is written about this. john stiles is written about this. but laundering is also about adding value right? so if you think about the the metaphors and the imagery here, it's like money laundering you make it clean, but you can make clothing clean and you launder it and you turn it into a better version of itself. you're adding value that way and i found it really fascinating to think about the production of clothing laundering but also all the kinds of mending and then remaking of clothes that people do they're constantly adding value to this stuff and so it's not just making it prettier. it is in fact, you know turning making this into a more valuable item and then that's part of adding value and like exchanging it and turning into currency as well. so i feel like people are kind of printing money in some ways when they're doing this and that part we've never really kind of considered i find that to be fascinating so the industrialization part you know, that's the storyline is that that i was raised on and that i think it's still kind of central to the literature. is that the early 19th century you get the mechanization of cotton production and weaving and spinning you get the low mills and then it all is basically industrialized in the focus on is on people who work in the mill. so the presumption that basically mechanization is taking over the whole situation here when textile production but then i started looking in and it's actually way more complicated than that. so textiles are unevenly mechanized. so cotton is mechanized wool is much harder to mechanize although it is mechanized faster linen isn't really mechanized until in the late 19th or the 20th century and silk is also the weaving of it becomes mechanized but still the making of silk is actually really difficult in the weaving of it is is difficult to it's more moderately mechanized. so the other so there are all sorts of spaces. economy for hand labor, especially within in production with wool. the best wool is still done by hand in cotton production is also a lot of really fine cons. you're still done by him because the stuff that machines do isn't that great at first and then the more stuff you produce the more opportunities the art of fashion it into clothing which actually produces more hand labor and so you'll find a lot of hand labor like in the delaware river valley for instance that is growing up alongside factory labor, and this gets to that, you know, skills and value and even then if you're working in a factory skills still matter, so it's not like you just anybody can walk in there and do it, although somehow we tend to presume that and the same way that we kind of resume anybody so stuff right all when they could do that. it's like no it's actually takes a lot of skill and like really good class if it's well done. that's what makes it commercially viable. so, you know and before mechanization basically all cloth is done in the household and what distinguishes you know homespun from commercial cloth is the quality. and the quality is not something that is determined by gender women reduce quality or people can produce quality. it's protect it has nothing to do with race either it has to do with somebody's skills so women and you know enslave people free blacks all these people are concentrating oftentimes in textile hand production and also mechanized textile production, too, but textile hand production because they can basically create value with their hands, but they can also keep the value with their hands. and so i find this to be really important right? we've missed this key part of the whole explanation as to why these things are gendered, but i would argue also raised to because in fact out of all the things that you can produce out of all of your very bad options if you are a woman a poor person or a person of color in this period textile production actually provides you a way to keep at least some of what you produce and legally and this is really important. so for instance, have these letters that were in duke university. manuscripts archives and they're from women who in 1840s were working low mills. they turn all of their wages into fabric. and i find this fascinating right so they buy fabric they can buy it in low, and it's a good deal relative to where they live. they then go home and sell it and there's all this correspondence back and forth between the sisters. it's like don't tell people how much it costs at all because they want to charge more back at home. right and then they have all this other kinds of, you know directives as an i'm sending you, you know this large cut of long cut of coffee. don't cut it up. don't cut it up to sell it that will devalue it and so they're very aware here of what kinds of goods they can produce but then i'll also what kinds of value they can claim all of those women are actually unmarried but the connection of women in textiles is so close that you know, the idea that if you're a woman textiles textiles is the thing you do and you trade in that has become really ingrained by that point. so yeah, i think that piece of it is really important for understanding industrialization, but then also seeing industrialization actually increases the spaces and opportunities for skilled and labor to thank you. michael. novak. you've got a hand up, please join us. can you hear me? yes we can. okay. good afternoon. thank you for being here. my question is your talking a lot about the about the manufacturing of cloth and textiles and how it relates to people's role in the law in the economy. i was wondering if this is if this is in relating anyway if you've looked into the making of shoes and if that was similar if there was it was totally different. i don't know if you've looked at that. i'm just curious if you have if you found anything interesting. yeah, i don't actually look into the making of shoes but people claim shoes that kind of include shoes in the textile rubric which i find fascinating like i think this relates to some of martha was talking about these people are really they're very creative and it's like textiles and clothing belongs to me that handkerchiefs belong to me too and hats oh and scarves and shoes too. so, you know, basically after certain point is like well it has something to do with textiles feathers are for hats right if it passes through my hands i own it. so it's not just the clothing you wear. it's all this other stuff and so all the accessories get included in or people try to include them in and they're fairly successful in doing so although not always right so they include all those in there and so that's kind of why i have this people always ask me what are textiles. it's like, well basically it's a legal category. it's all the goods that you can include within this category in this category sort of extends out to include shoes. there is one great case with this where there's an enslaved man if you has a solid business dealing in dry goods to other encycloped people in his community and he is accused of stealing shoes. i think this also gets back to this question of i and we and so what he does is he brings out all of the enslaved customers who shop with him essentially and he has a store in it's a store of goods not an actual physical place and so he brings out all of these witnesses who one lines up and says, no the shoes that you say we're stolen he didn't have them because the shoes he was selling those shoes are really poor quality and i was looking for like better shoes. so, you know, he's saying no those weren't the shoes he had, you know, we have another person line up and say no. no, there's something else going on here. there was actually a fight about so this as they're all testifying about the goods of this man has and the fact that he has goods and is selling to other enslaved people as a way than of saying that no, he didn't actually steal the goods. it's really name because in fact they all could have been arrested for like, you know, he could be arrested for for dealing goods with enslaved people. he's not supposed to be selling but all of that became evidence of the fact that he didn't steal the shoes in question because other people saw him with a whole different array of goods, but not the shoes. so again, it was the way that he was dealing all the people surrounding him within able to ultimately save him from that theft charge and it was also interesting that the mattresses didn't really care that he was like selling shoes and other dry goods in the secondary market they were more concerned with theft, but the presumption was he could make some sort of legal claims to those goods and in fact so much so that he could even engage in selling them. so thank you up next to leon fink and then if ursula rack could stand by we'll call on you after leon. hey laura. hey leon, but here this account of what i'm sure is gonna is a great book. leon i think we've lost you. i was intrigued by your response to sonia michelle's. hello. hello, can you hear me on yes? can you hear me so we can okay. i don't know what the problem is up. in any case i was interested in the relationship laura between the world that you're describing of basically home-based textile production and industrial world of production that we're more familiar with at least as labor historians are and i was in interested in your suggestion that there's maybe an interaction between these two worlds, but one distinction seems to be that at least the is in the methods of attending to grievances in your world. it seems to be an individual and legal arena and the more industrial centers. it is a history. um, you know from through amusky through the southern mills seems to be a more collective of form of address. could you comment on that distinction and what you think might be the interactions and you think there's a whole world of labor history that might for example among even among industrial textile workers who might at the same time be involved not only in home production, but also in legal complaints that were we haven't really examined yet. yeah, you know, i was really struck. i mean i was like i said raised on that distinction between you have to household production you have the industrial production and yet a lot of the work in textile and textile history is blurring all those distinctions by pushing at least commercialization, but also the transformation of labor relations not just the commercialization back in time and putting that actually within households. so you have putting out system. you have the breakup of of independent producers and having them glumped under you know, somebody who's a merchant who's then organizing production? and skimming, you know from the top of basically they become wage workers but working in their households and often relying on household labor of women and children. so all that is happening within households, but then those people sort of move into industry into into factories, but that transition i don't think this is abrupt as what we've imagined and some of the people who are coming to the united states are like, you know, they're they're refugees from the linen industry in the british isles and the woolen industry too in the british isles. and so they're trying to get away from that system, but they're also relying on the skills then to set up shop in their own homes and often the women are the ones who are taking over that kind of labor, but then it's an easy sort of transition into some of these factory settings where it's not quite as abrupt as you see in cotton so you would have wool factories where you might be working in the factory, but you're kind of doing the same thing you'll be doing at home and some will factories are actually putting out systems. so a seth rogmans work is really interesting in this regard, but then i think your question about communal approaches that i think you're getting the wrong impression if you think i'm saying that these are individual and individualistic claims. i mean, that would be the kind of the the gloss that civil outlets on this where your frame the legal framework cashew as an individual with rights you then makes claims against another individual this is taking place in even then actually a lot of and i'm hoping the book like underscourses even then that's a legal frame and in fact all of that depends on a whole bunch of evidence that is involved with it depends on other people knowing about your property claims and be able to come and justify that and support you and all of that. so there's usually a community behind any sort of legal claim to property but then if you look at the public side that i'm talking about where people are making claims to property without rights you come in with your whole crew. sarah allingham did it actually is what sarah alham didn't do. it's what roseanna marra did so she comes in with her she and her witnesses and all these people come in and you've got to have all those folks and so there is a sense of community and collaboration in there of understanding what certain you know, a principles are in your community what sort of practices are accepted and then it's a constant effort of enforcement which involves a whole range of people and if you think about it, that's not so different from what's going on mills where like you have certain expectations about workplace practices about value of your labor about the relationships. you have at the people who are employing you and then there's collective action around that you're just going to get more collective action because you're all alone together in that factory, right? but you find the same kinds of expectations with the enforcement of the practices surrounding the exchange and ownership of excels generally, so i don't think they're as dissimilar. actually. i think there's overlap there. and i think that the framework as i said earlier like the right space framework. it's a legal framework and to mistake that with how things actually work is to like mix those things up. i mean the legal framework is not social how so people think about property. it's how the legal framework handles that and people slot their issues into that framework. and sometimes that framework is really important in the way that people start imagining things, but it's entirely different from the way people actually operate oftentimes. thank you ursula rack. you've been patiently waiting, please join us if you unmute. hello, good morning from new zealand. i'm a historian myself, and i was wondering what how was it with mains clothing, especially when they were younger and you know sons but what happened for example with the clothes when they have spent a father or yeah, the the owner of the woman died. how was that working was the clothes from the main also then in the position of the women or was only women's clothes and peddling and so on her property. thank you. so yeah, the clothes that belong to the person belong to the person so it's kind of it's not presumed then that the like a husband's clothes with them move to the wife and people are very particular about their clothes. so, you know like men are really particular about their clothes too and their wives are not their wives will like and this is kind of well established in scholarship that i did not do that wives are responsible for linens. basically, but men are like their coats and their pants they go off and do that themselves and i have a group of women coulee women who have in western virginia. you have a whole business and they they sell they be they do a bunch of different kinds of things all in textile production, but one of the sort of key customer bases is men who want really fancy coats from militia masters, and this is a thing so you have a uniform which is not actually uniform it is a uniform but there's nothing uniform about it. i also think that's kind of fascinating actually, so they all come with sort of the same style but different colors they want braids and they want epileps and they want, you know buckets and they need little trimmings over here. and so they do this, you know, they do the coats and the guys are really picky about what it looks like and they come in for fittings. just great. so there is this attachment of people to you know, the clothes that they wear that way and so within families, yes, it's it's the in the children's clothes are there's the wives closer there's and then the other textiles that they're able to kind of account for in their community in the community knows that they're theirs so there's this concert sort of sorting around that way but yes, the men's clothes don't automatically go to the wife the wife does not automatically own everything that's in the household it is she has to establish those claims just to work really hard to establish those clients. thank you. we have a question in the q&a her hand also went up but then it went down. so at least i have the question and i will pose it on behalf of kyra haynes who writes as someone who is doing their senior thesis on victorian fashion. could you talk about your research process and what it was like and what sources you relied upon for your research? so this is where i martha has. like listen to me talk about this research forever and ever and the research process was was long and arduous. i feel like i was doing this when i didn't know i was doing it so i started kind of like collecting stuff about textiles when i was doing my dissertation with him nothing to do with textiles. i just got distracted by it. so i've been collecting this for a very long time and i didn't really see how that off it together until or how i was gonna fit together until recently, but i've looked at court cases local court cases. i've looked at federal court cases. i think it's state court cases. i've looked at account books. i've looked at correspondence about clothing. this is not the kind of book that i looked at the material artifacts themselves. and so this is not really the kind of book that i could have done. early in my career. i think it's three. you're very privileged you accumulate things over time and in you're able to have these longer term projects and this is definitely one of those if i had just and i actually had a crisis of conscience and faith or i don't know method maybe would be a better way to put it when i was doing footnotes for an article recently and they said i cited a collection of court cases and they said no we need specific court cases that prove this point and the point i was making was about the legal qualities of trunks. so trunks are legal container for people who don't own their own houses. and so i had tons of cases on trunks hundreds of cases and trunks and i didn't know what trunks meant and then one day it occurred to me as i was looking at the hundreds of cases of trunks cases on trucks that that people were referring to trunks as a way to demarcate the property is theirs and it had definitely legal qualities and in fact you search warrants for trunks for instance. so i was stuck because i'm like am i supposed to cite the several hundred cases on trunks that i have because if you look at any one case you don't see the point it would just refer to a trunk and you would walk by that case like i had walked by those cases. it was just that i happened to make notes about trunks because i don't know i was like doing something verbatim, you know like transcription of the court record. so i didn't know what to do exactly because this is through practice and it's through repetition of these things. and so this gets looking to megan's question about method. it's like you have to look at this for a very long time and you have to look at it over and over and over and over and this is us that i think what you know, martha's comment too is about it's like this is about practice the way that it becomes law is if you do it over and over and over and over so it makes it really difficult to explain citations to folks because they're expecting the court case that establishes the principle and there's no one court case that does that in this instance. it's just the repetition and so you kind of have to hang in there long enough to get the repetition in persistent. so this works, but that's kind of difficult if you're like doing a senior thesis for instance. you don't have the time to do that. but if you could just elaborate a little bit more so you've had many years of experience with these records and the issues that you're dealing with. and so this is in the back of your mind it stays there and that allows you to see eventually things that you didn't see before, but you said terrific phrase seeing a world that i didn't know was there and i just i'd love that that phrasing but as a legal historian who is interested both in the law, but in the real people and the social relations that the law can help illuminate, it's safe to say that you're diving into the world of legal cases allows you to recreate that kind of broader social world and the dynamic and the relationships between people so these cases are about more than principle and outcomes, but they do allow you to see and then reconstitute this world that you didn't know was there. yeah, and it's like it's it's true. yes, and it's true. but if you look at like local court cases and martha feel free to lay in here on local court cases. so you get little fragments. it's like i have a paragraph and it will say, you know, so until ellen stoled something out of sue's trunk. and sue said it was in her. she hadn't closed the lid and i'm like, what is this about so you have them another case? it's about a you know, somebody else told something that's a list of stuff from a truck and you get another little phrase. you don't get much though. so it is about the repetition and so like for instance with trunks i realized you repetition that you keep the lid open then you've not reduced. what's in the trunk to your possession. this is important if you are enslaved or servant in a house because you could be accused of stealing something of your masters and mistresses is found in the trunk, but then you say the lid was open so you hadn't reduced it to your possession if you close the lid then you're in you're in like territory there where you you've claim the goods as your own because you've closed the lid. still gray though because you just closed it. you could open it back up which means that your master and mistress could come back in and then take whatever it is that they're accused of stealing out of the trunk if you close the lid and lock it then you've reduced this to your possession because you've made it so that is a container that nobody else can get into? understanding that though took me like hundreds of cases to figure it out. right? so and there's no one case that says ha the principle of the open trunk lid and so it is those legal cases the local cases in particular. are you just have to handle them differently than you would like a state or federal case where there are dealing with the principle of law and the point is to state that and here they're like, they're not and they're they're hiding this from kind of martha you could weigh in on this too. i think just push us a little bit, you know to say that you know what i think i've learned from you, but i don't want to speak for you. but what i've what i've taken from your work is the mistake we make is thinking that what law is is text that law is doctrine that laws the constitution that law is the common law as it is articulated and iterated over time. that is not law that law is requires for historians. yes and understanding of the text but ultimately the history of law is what people do with the text and how people in their practices produce the text and that is so it's to say that the distinction as if somehow there's law and then sort of mixing with laws something like i don't know social or cultural political history is sort of misses. i think the intervention because the intervention is to say that's a false distinction and that actually the history of law is the history of how parties people societies and more make meaning and how meaning changes over time how meaning is produced over time. so maybe i've overstated it laura, but that's a way to just sort of force the point i guess. yeah. thanks martha that just thank you. and yes and part of the point of this book too is to show kind of changes in that over time because we kind of take the institutional history of courts for granted. we kind of assume that there is this thing law it works in a certain way and you know, you got the higher court you got the lower courts, and it's always like that and part of this is to mess with people's heads about this to change our understanding of this history and so like a whole chapter on overlapping jurisdictions and overlapping bodies of law in the you know, the decades following the revolution and so it's even more important in the late 18th and early 19th century in the united states where they're different jurisdictions where they're different bodies of law where there is less coordination of all of that and so there is also a real sense that you can create principles to practice and so as martha was saying it's not that this practice and somehow then we have law over here. it's that the principles you can see and create through the practice and those principles have as much kind of legal traction as what is in a written text and over the course of this period though. you also do see that certain elements of written texts acquire more attraction and more power and authority within the legal system and those tend to be about right space laws based where you get more about procedure. so for instance in local court cases with all the women who bring in their textiles and say look i know and i bought it here and i did this and i'm wearing it and you understand all of that starts giving way to more procedural-based cases or cases based and procedural rights. so the questions would be more about well, you know was the door locked or not because that would be about whether it's breaking and entering or whether they're just entered and you get this more sort of formalized right space system that starts 15 a lot of these local cases and the written law and particular kinds of written laws that are taught in law schools that are then elevated in this period as being the primary source of law that's part of the, you know, the developments that are happening as well. so, you know, the reason why we go there is because of this period where that kind of law acquires more meaning and authority and it starts taking it more space and people start arguing that the written texts are actually really more important than the practices themselves and we've forgotten then that those practices used to have real legal traction and they still do in a lot of ways because even to this day, you know brown people to education is a great example. it's about practice people are constantly in supreme court cases talking about us supreme court case is talking about practice history. what used to be originalism is in fact about you know this idea about what the practices actually were in the past, so we still also give practice a lot of space and law and we don't always i think recognize that but we don't see the real space it had in the 19th century and we don't see it as creating law in the way that it did in that period thank you. you tell many stories. in the book the very diverse set of characters you end the book with perhaps the best-known name of mary todd lincoln if you could just say just a few words about that example and what it reveals and how and why you end the book with her experience. yeah. it was a revelation for me that mary todd lincoln produced a national crisis by trying to sell her clothes that she wore while she was, you know, the president. i'm like, wow, so this to me is this example of how clothing loses it's legal valence and becomes more like simply a consumer item and if it's a consumer item that is simply your second skin and especially in the post emancipation period to sell your second skin is akin to selling yourself and this is the way that then you know merit i think is just completely ridicule than the national press for she's such bad page. she's selling herself. herself. she's like a prostitute. and in fact always sold their clothes. this was their capital. this is what they have entire secondhand clothing store set up. i most main streets in america to handle exactly this kind of thing. and yeah it is cast in a very different way as a consumer good not something that is legally legible and legally important for people to do and the real important part of this as well. is that caught in the midst of all of this is a list of calculate. he was married totally consumede and she has an entire business set up which is not just being a seamstress but it is designing and fashioning clothing and making it for you know, washington's easily women so her carefully design garments are then held up ridicule by the entire country and then basically all of the labor and the skill that was brought into that is also erased as these goods become simply consumer goods. why don't you sell your old clothes just go buy new ones who has old clothes anyway, and she never recovered. luckily, she didn't get her business back. it was just erasure of her her skill and also the legal asked the legal qualities of clothing too that you know made them actually forms the currency in capital that women sold all the time and the poor people encycloped people had sold all the time and so it is this really sad. i need to the story too because you know, this is supposed to emancipation period this is when we're going to enact the 14th amendment. nobody gets rid of coverture at that point married on this property acts do not get rid of coventure and elizabeth keckley is going to be in a very different position than african-american men in this period and then even then african american men. well they do is like dylan penningross new book is going to be about all this. there's still is a lot of ability for african americans to claim property, but we've not fully considered the ways that men and women's relationship to property is very different based on the different trajectory of the extension of rights, but then also the erasure of these other ways of claiming property and megan this may get back to your point as well is that we're so accustomed to thinking this property is an individual possession that we also can't imagine different ways of owning using regulating property that it could be for the public good that it could be about communities of people that they're different ways and they're different ways of making claims on the productive capacity of that property to beyond simply those of individuals and absolute ownership that we imagine today. so thank you. i unfortunately have to draw this to a close because our designated time is up, but i do want to express my sincere. thanks to laura marthamy name i. i'm a professor of american religious history at yale university and it's my privilege to serve as moderator for this panel today. this session asks how national state and local governments have sought to manage religious diversity throughout american history. together these panelists tell a story of how us state actors working within seemingly secular realms like us military governance health care and taxation created an unstated religious policy that defined some religions as marginal. and others as mainstream in three

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Laura Edwards Only The Clothes On Her Back 20220723

this seminar subtitled historical perspectives on international and national affairs this afternoon. we will be focusing on a new book by the princeton historian laura edwards titled only the clothes on her back clothing and the hidden history of power in the 19th century united states published by oxford university, press in late, february and joining us this afternoon as discussions are martha jones of john's hopkins and megan sweeney of the university of michigan. i'm eric arneson from the george washington university co-chair of the washington history seminar along with my colleague christian osterman of the wilson center who cannot be here today. the washington industry seminar is a collaborative non-partisan venture of the woodrow wilson center's history and public policy program and the american historical associations national history center. and for over the past decade the seminar has been meeting weekly and pre-covid times in person at the wilson center and since the pandemic well, here in the virtual realm behind the scenes two people make these seminars possible pete bierstecker of the wilson center and rachel wheatley of the national history center, and i'd like to thank institutional supporters the george washington university department of history in particular as well as a number of anonymous individual donors. and as i say every week, we invite you to join their ranks. on the logistics front, please note. today's session is being recorded and can soon be found on our institutions respective websites and crucially when we get to the question and answer section of the webinar, we ask those with questions to use the raise hand function on zoom or the q&a function not chat and to those watching on facebook live. you can email questions to rachel wheatley at our weekly our wh e a t l e y at historians.org, and we will call on as many folks as we can we prefer for you to raise hand and pose the question yourself. otherwise, i have to pose it for you. all right with that it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker this afternoon laura edwards, who is the class of 1921 bicentennial professor in the history of american law and liberty in history department at princeton university. her work focuses on the legal history of the 19th century united states with an emphasis on people's interactions with the law and the legal system. she's the author of a number of books a legal history of the civil war and reconstruction a nation of rights published in 2015, and the people and their peace legal culture and the transformation of inequality in the post-revolutionary south 2000. nine a book that was awarded the american historical associations littleton griswold prize for the best book and law in society and the southern historical associations charles sydney price for the best book in southern history. she's received fellowship from the newberry library the national humanity center national endowment for the humanities the acls the bogan high foundation and the american bar foundation. and today we're delighted that she's here speaking about her most recent book only the clothes on her back clothing and the hidden history of power in the 19th century united states. laura the screen is all yours. welcome. to the washington history seminar thank you so much for having me and thank you for the lovely introduction and thank you to megan and martha for coming today as well. so i'm gonna start with a story because the book is full of stories. so i'm gonna begin with six women in a sheet. so all of these women and the sheet appeared in new york city's municipal court in 1804, and actually it was the sheet that started at all which is apropos because this book is about a textiles. so one of the women sarah allingham charged another woman judith friel was stealing the sheet. although these charges really that's the oversimplified this whole situation. so judith frio was a washer woman who just happened to have the sheet amongst the dirty laundry. she was collecting that day. so imagine her consternation where sarah ellingham ran out into the street way later grabbed up her bundles and began rummaging through them and the city streets loudly actually remington three of them. so when allingham found which she insisted was hershey she announced her discovery and marched off with it to file charges in the new york. city's mayor's court and judicial was following in her way. so once in court, it became clear that judith friel was in fact really transporting that she to her house to be washed. it was another woman sally riley who had taken it nearly a year earlier. so riley had been sold it to rosanna morara. this is getting confusing who's bundle of laundry was the one that contained the sheet so both of those women joined the other two making four women and a sheet in court then two more women appeared as witnesses to support roseanna moraris claims that she had purchased a sheep from sally riley bringing us to six women and a sheep. so ultimately the court listen to all this they awarded the sheet to rose anniversara. so case closed but actually not really robert given conventional historical wisdom. this dispute never really should have made it to court at all. these were poor women. they're squabbling over a cheap sheet and more to the point. they were married women encumbered by coverture. a collection of legal principles limited wives legal rights and subordinated them to their husbands among other things coverage of prohibited women from owning property and prosecuting court cases in their own name more than that covered sugar gave husband's legal rights to property in their wives and property that their wives bought into marriage and anything that they acquired afterward by those rules. sarah allingham could not own a she let alone prosecutor case to claim ownership. yet and sarah allenham's case officials accepted both the women's claims two property and their access to the legal system. they did ultimately give a nod to coverture's rules. they identified the prosecutor as allen hans husband attributing ownership of the sheet to him, but after filling in the obligatory boxes officials dispense with this fiction that the matter at anything due to the husbands. in fact, they were not in court at all for the court officials as well as the women involve. the question was which married woman possessed the sheet not whether a married woman could possess it. now to make things more interesting here this case was not at all unusual between the revolution and the civil war courts the united states regularly dealt with similar cases cases involving claims by people on the legal margins often people without property rights at all to clothing related accessories such as hats and handkerchiefs as well as uncut cloth and bed linens. so how could people without property rights claim property? and that is the question that i explore in this book only the closer back. the answers i argue lie in the legal qualities that attach to clothing so people without property rights including married women and enslaved people relied on long-standing legal principles. that attach clothing to the person who wore it, but they did not stop there through use. they expanded those legal principles to make legal claims to all kinds of textiles and accessories that they made or that simply passed you their hands because it was textiles and something related to cloth they could keep this they could make legal claims to it and then they went further using the security provided by law to turn these goods into currency into capital and collateral for credit which gave them an entry point into governing institutions and the economy. people like sarah allen ham. we're not on the outside looking in as we have usually assumed they actually use textiles to include themselves in governing institutions and the economy and they really made law this way insisting on the recognition of commonly held legal principles that unlike property rights app. broadly to everyone so the first of our sarah ellington's she was not really that unusual once you start looking for textiles you realize that they're everywhere people made them. they sold them they talked about them. they thought about them all the time yet scholars from period period between the revolution and the civil war have tended to kind of walk by such property and assume that it was more like consumer goods and instead focus on the kind of property land enslaved property commodities owned by elite white men the minority of the population the textiles in this period were not just consumer goods. they too were valuable property and valuable property that unlike other forms of property. most americans could legally own. so by the time of the revolution the accountant the economics of textiles had hit really kind of a sweet spot would have been luxury goods before we're now more affordable and more available and not so cheap is to be completely worthless quality mattered and people knew quality broad range of americans including the -- and slave could spot find linens silk wool at 10 paces and they could assess trimming such as ribbon and bridge just as accurately and that knowledge was i'm prominent display in theft cases across the united states parties to these cases were describe coughing clothing in great detail distinguishing cheap goods from expensive ones and rattling up information about fiber content colors and patterns that most people today would never notice let alone remember and all the details function like figures on a banknote actually in fact textiles were preferable to things notes for most for many americans. the possession of banknotes was suspect for poor people and people without property rights. the presumption was that they should not have them and so if they did it was suspicious but not so with the possession of textiles because the legal principles of associated with them gave people claims to them textiles also had economic advantages over banknotes because they actually held their value more reliably the material qualities of textiles suited them for use this currency as well. there was considerable consensus as to their value. they were extremely liquid and they came in different denominations, which was handy. they ran the gamut from handkerchiefs, which you could used by small things and big expensive links of cloth, which you could use to buy more expensive things. when people traded in these goods, they were not bartering they valued items and pounds or dollars and then bought and sold accordingly and leverage the value of textiles as people did with other property pawning them lending them or saving them to fund future ventures. the result was this vast secondary market, which provided not just access to goods, but also a means to circulate them. so this part of the market was kind of everywhere and nowhere in particular it included palm brookers auctioneers pedalers grocers tavern keepers tailors dressmakers unlicensed shotkeepers vendors and open air markets as well as individuals who just sold on the streets and from their homes. and to say that this market was underground or informal actually misconstrues, its institutional underpinnings, which depended on widely recognized enforced rules ownership was established through relationship to the goods as witnessed by other people through possession through use and display wearing was a really good way to establish ownership. so was buying and selling in public. sarah allingham ultimately lost her she to rose annamarara because rosanna marra had exactly the kind of evidence that proved possession and took the place of the information. i received she had witnesses who could describe the property and value it connected to the purported owner provide the data purchase verify the transaction and she actually had the sheet in her possession. there were also rules for exchange people pond cloth, or they wanted it back. they loaded if they did not in pawning people used clothing and other textiles is collateral against which they borrow a pain fees which was interest each week people charged with f actually would point out that they had pawned the goods which meant they didn't steal them because they could always get them back. they had not yet reduced them to their possession but loans were different with loans the owner expected the return of the textiles value plus interest not the goods themselves which declined in value and use over time. nobody wants the handkerchief that you just somebody else blew their nose and back. so the terms were then agreed to at the time of the loan verbally. and this is actually what sarah allenhan's case was all about the testimony that she had blown the testimony suggest that she had actually loaned the sheet to her neighbor sally riley not because riley was in desperate need of badlands, but because both women were leveraging the sheets value riley then sold it to rosanna marra, which was accepted practice and did not negate her obligation to repay the value of the sheet. it was only after alling him believe that riley had reneged of the loan that she took matters into her own hand and sees the sheet hoping to recruit some of her loss. then she went to court because it was never just about the sheet the rules of exchange really mattered those expectations of enforcement ran deep in kept local courts in both rural and urban areas very very busy. it is really remarkable that people without property rights felt confident in pursuing cases that looked an awful lot like assertions of property rights even more remarkable is responsive local officials who dutifully sorted through the evidence involving sheets shifts. tips shirts and shoes to figure out whose property was whose the legal qualities of textiles though only went so far and the book traces the trajectory of their use their eyes. they're used in decline and over time. people without property rights could not make claims through civil actions the usual means of reclaiming property through debt cases for instance because such suits required the possession of rights. even people with rights but on the legal margins because of racing class found civil actions difficult because they did not have the resources and the kinds of evidence necessary to produce to pursue them. so officials then shifted claims to prep to public law where they could be tried as criminal offenses. usually theft the point in this area of law was to write wrongs to put things back where they belong to make things right and that included sheets. so in this body of law court officials could act on complaints by people without the rights necessary in civil cases by treating these matters as things involving the public order, so they're a violation of the public order not a of their individual rights. matters involving claims to textiles also fit really well within this area of law because the legal principles that allowed everyone to owed and trade these goods we're so well established and established through practice as part of the public order. prosecution affirm those practices and restored the property to the places where they belong without recognizing the rights of the individuals involved now this provided some flexibility for people to make legal claims claims, but it also came with real costs the legal charge theft. was it convenience, but it made the very property claims of people without strong claims to property rights. it made all of those claims to property different and it made them also seem illegitimate. in fact, it criminalized them. somebody could own the property, but another person was declared a criminal the implications while ominous in the decades following the revolution would become inescapable as mid-century approached and the balance of legal author. to shifting towards those areas of law that focus more on the rights of individuals. now writes had definite advantages over textiles reclaims to textiles state in particular contexts with the people who knew about them the people who had testify about them the people who could show that they own them rightspace claims to property traveled freely with individuals had rights, they could claim property across all the mess of jurisdictional lines in the federal system within states from state to state from states to territories and pretty much in all bodies of laws. well, now this kind of portability mattered in a world where people moved and goods also flowed freely. in fact rights particularly property rights for this rare constant across all the jurisdictional lines of local state and federal. but that situation was challenging for merchants who were working across all of these jurisdictional lines, and it's so they needed some sort of constant that allowed them to to do business and in do this make sense similar kinds of claims across these church just from the lines, but the problems were awesome more fundamental here. so all of these laws all of these jurisdictions determined a person status and how they can move through the world. so people of african descent notably. we're presumed to be enslaved in some states and free and others. so this is a problem. no wonder then that the elimination of all of these restrictions and rights particularly property rights, we can key political issues for women for african americans the decades leading up to the civil war right to the things that allow people status also to have constancy across all this massive jur. the lines the problem though. is that the extension of rights did not allow for the kind of claims made with textiles nor did they eliminate the other legal restrictions that kept all women many african americans and even poor white men from claiming and using rights. textiles had given these people legal cover, but without them they were vulnerable. now to be sure the extension of rights helped. in fact, it was impossible to navigate either the legal order or the economy without them but the possession of rights only went so far as long as other kinds of restrictions remain in place. so by the late 19th century actually as the book argues many americans had little more than the close in their backs, but that property had become pretty flimsy legal coverings by that. and the people on the legal margins though, and this is i think really the point of the book did not just wait around for rights to be extended to them. they use the legal materials. they had at hand throughout the 19th century to work toward a world where claim their labor possess property and define their own destinies and those legal materials were literally the clothes on their backs. thank you very much laura edwards. our first discussion this afternoon is professor martha s jones, who is the society of black alumni presidential professor professor of history and a professor at the snf agora institute at the johns hopkins university. she is a legal and cultural historian. who's work examines. how blat americans have shaped the story of american democracy. professor jones is the author of vanguard. how black women broke barriers won the vote and insisted on a quality for all published in 2020 and was selected as one of times 100 must read for that year. she is also the author of the award-winning birthright citizens a history of race and rights in antebellum america published in 2018 all bound up together the woman questioned in african-american public culture 1830 to 1900 published in 2007, and she's co-editor of toward an intellectual history of black women published in 2015 prior to her academic career. she was a public interest to litigator in new york city, and she currently serves on the boards on the society of american historians national women's history museum the us capital historical society johns hopkins university, press the general of african-american history and slavery and abolition. professor jones martha welcome to the seminar screen is yours. thanks very much, eric. thank you to the washington history seminar and the aha in the wilson center for convening us today. and i want to start by saying very distinctly remember. when i said almost simultaneously to laura edwards and to making sweeney both that they had to meet one another they had to trade notes here were these two extraordinary scholars with such deep engagement and commitment to the craft and to the culture and to the everyday life of textiles even in their own lives. that means that this afternoon. i'm a bit of a happy interloper. i can barely thread a needle and i need to read the label to distinguish between rayon and silk. and still from both of you. i've learned so much about my own archives and the women who vomit who i have encountered there pilfering and thieving and secreting and snatching and otherwise claiming fabric and clothes that were not their own. if in local courthouses, these were women deemed petty thieves and on occasion actually not so petty. it was in conversation with laura edwards and through her work that has become this magnificent book only the clothes on her back that i was required to return to those archives and read them a new. so, thank you laura for the book for your mentorship and for your example. it has been truly transformative in my work. so when i say this book is much anticipated. well, that's an understatement i guess but many of us have been treated to parts of this work over the years at conferences and workshops and through comments on panels all of which suggested the degree to which this would be path breaking and so here we are to offer congratulations and some comment. one of the things that's remarkable about this book is the degree to which historians of capitalism of early america's many legalities along with historians of textiles trade the economic lives of women and more will be fascinated and changed by this study. laura edwards has brought her vast and field defining expertise on the quotidian and yet profoundly consequential dynamics of local legal culture into conversation with the far-reaching. even global dynamics that defined the production trade and the market of textiles and early america. these latter what in my work might be abstract matters on it might cause the eyes of cultural historians like me to glaze over but laura edwards of course has stories as you've already heard this afternoon one of the strengths of this work is it's insistence and it's deep capacity to bear out the claim that local people ordinary americans even those marginalized and formal law. we're connected to global markets and changed market forces in their own lives and by their own terms. it's a work that takes us back to dylan penningroth's important enduring claims of kinfolk. as i read this again. i remembered these are histories that take new and even unorthodox points of view that change our thinking no longer are ordinary people merely those buffeted about by capitalism's market forces their agents of law and lawmaking and while laura might see it. otherwise for me. this is the best of the approach to legal history pioneered by folks like dirk hartog and exemplified in his article pigs and positivism now many decades ago, the law was what people even ordinary people made it out to be. it was the contest that they waged the debates they weighed in on all that rather than the text alone is for us the history of law. one of the things i think readers might not anticipate is how this book is also an elegant primer in the history of fabrics and textiles. they're crafting production styling and more. such an insider's perspective could require a glossary in a less well-written book but here the value of textiles comes plain as we learn what it took to render them as articles of practical adornment. pretentious beauty and even class and status this foundation is what permits us to accept how such materials also became economic instruments currency capital and credit. any historian who has read a will or a state inventory has noted a family squabble over garments and fabric or like me marvel that how many cases on a 19th century local courthouse criminal docket mentioned the theft of textiles and clothes by someone who had no apparent use for them. finally has an answer to the questions these archives present. as laura edwards explains these items were property unlike any other and their value extended far beyond how they adorned oneself one's dependence or one's home textiles were property of a distinct sword so much so that even americans shunted to the margins of legal culture could claim their places and their property in court houses nearly uncanny success. this is a book of consequence for historians of law broadly be they scholars of latin america africa and asia. or those across many us subfields including african-american native american women's history. so many of us are at work on the intersection of ordinary people and global markets, and we see our archives in new through this work. i do have a sort of i don't know rambly questioned for laura edwards, and i'll try it here and hope we'll get to it in discussion and it really is about and laura you'll recognize this question because it's not the first time i've asked it of you about scale or the register of this work on the on the one hand. those of us who know your work are not surprised how you render this history as profoundly intimate right shaped by the rules and the logic that were local so that we see how ordinary people's engagements with markets that were far-flung actually played out on the ground in lives. and then the other hand there, is that other scale. this is a history that plays out on a world scale across europe across asia across the americas knit together by movements ocean season rivers, and i'm interested still in how you think about the choices of emphasis how you help us sort of stay steady as we're asked and you demand of us to think in these varied frames folks will encounter those references to india and china in the middle east that help us. i think to anchor those kinds of questions and for me only the clothes on her back enjoins with scholars who have importantly taken the history of women in textiles in particular beyond the history of labor beyond the history of fashion and adornment. to find at least political though. i think half-breaking here is finding not only the political but the legal meaning of those actions and transactions. i'm interested in intrigued by how native american historians will also find their way to and into this book, um, thinking about native americans own local legal cultures. yes, but the central role of textiles textile making fashioning and more in native american culture and they will figure here. so i think that's my time, but i do again want to say thank you to everybody for convenience. and especially thank you to laura edwards for this extraordinary book. it's really an honor to be here with you. thank you, martha. laura would you like to respond to that question that rather grand question that was just posed before we move on. sure sure. scale scale i had a really hard time with this book because on the one hand i started researching in the south thinking that a regional frame was the appropriate one and then it became very clear that region did not explain what i was looking for states did not explain what i was looking at actually and with this weird at least to me thinking at that time similarities between what was going on and like the new york city mayor's court in charleston, south carolina and south carolina up country and north carolina in pennsylvania, and it was strange to me because these were really very local jurisdictions that i was looking at, but the rules were operating when it came to textiles in a very similar way and i was like scratch in my head. i don't understand this and yet it became there when i started thinking about the global textile market and i started reading back in time and thinking about the way that in fact these goods have been moving across borders before there were even national borders right and that there's also real their legal principles that are developing relationship to the goods attach the goods and start to travel with them. so i had to really think outside our usual framework for understanding law right and policy. we usually think within a national framework and it was not the national framework that was operative here was actually a global market global trade in the principles that developed through them through those dynamics and then that spread to people that people picked up and used and so all of these legal principles kind of travel with the textiles themselves, but then they get out of root down and local areas people know them but to make them work it requires a lot of local knowledge. so you get the general principles, which is, you know, along the lines of the things that clothing attaches to you and if you have it you probably own it, but then in order at that you have to go very local because you know, which shirt belongs to which person is actually about a personal relationship to that particular item. so it is at once global and local and then part of the story is this development of the state law, but then kind of a national legal culture based on rights that circulates across all of these local jurisdictions that start to developing an intervening with all of this as well. so i'm trying to handle all of this scales at once and keep the focus, you know on the textiles, but as they move around through these jurisdictions as well. thank you very much before we move on just a reminder to those of you who are watching. you can participate as well. we have a number of people who have posed questions in the q&a function, but you could also use the raise hand function which has the advantage of i get to call on you and if you unmute you get to pose your question directly so you can start getting in the queue now if you so desire just an fyi. our second discussing this afternoon is megan sweeney the arthur f turnow associate professor of english afro-american and african studies and women's and gender studies at the university of michigan in ann arbor. she earned a ba in the history and literatures of religions from northwestern university and 1989 and a phd in literature from duke university in 2004. our publications include an award-winning monograph reading is my window books and the art of reading in women's prison published in 2010 and edited collection the story within us women prisoners reflect on reading 2012 and a collection of clothing related lyric essays called mendings, which is forthcoming from duke university, press in 2000 23 at the university of michigan megan sweeney currently serves as associate chair and as graduate studies in the women's and gender studies program as well as director of undergraduate studies in the department of english language and literature and as director of the hopwood program megan, welcome to the washington history seminar. thank you so much eric for that and i just want to say it's such an honor for me to participate in this conversation with both of you laura and martha, and i'm so grateful to have been brought together by this wonderful book. i remember when martha first told me about you laura and it's been so fun to dig into your work as you say about yourself and your acknowledgments. laura textiles have always distracted me too, and i want to begin by sharing two quick anecdotes that came to mind as i was reading only the clothes on her back. first in your acknowledgments you reference mulberry silks and carrboro, north carolina. i visited that shop about 35 years ago and keenly recall buying one yard of gorgeous fabric because that was all that i could afford but i was determined to design and sew a shirt with that amount. second when my husband and i got married many years ago my family gave us a spinning wheel and a loom as wedding gifts and we signed up for a spinning class while we were in graduate school, but ended up having to drop the class because the spinning was so difficult and we didn't have time to practice. i created some very lumpy strands that broke about every 30 seconds so i can attest to the considerable skill and dexterity and experience required for spinning and i want to say hats off to the many spinners you honor in your book. in terms of comments and questions about only the close on her back. i'd like to dwell for a minute on broader dimensions of the book that i especially admire and then get into some details with an observation and a few questions. throughout my reading i kept marveling at what a lucid compelling and lively account you offer of dense concepts and complex examples. i teach a course called threads what does clothing have to do with race culture politics and the environment and i'm so excited to incorporate more insights from your book into that course. i love your use of the weaving terms warp and weft to describe how people without strong claims to rights or property participated in constructing the country's legal fabric if we think of the warp as the laws that restricted most americans legal status and the weft as the textiles that people made legally meaningful. i love how you've organized each chapter around a particular historical case paired with a central concept such as currency credit or erasure those concepts provide such a helpful guide for readers. i love your manifest appreciation for the everyday textile artists confined to the margins of history and you're appreciation of their creations, which is evident when you describe for instance the rich details about preparing flax or fulling wool or when you rest on the bit of ribbon or lace that's in the story and i love the moments in which you dwell on the delightful language of the world. you conjure much of which is lost to us today. ali bally's carrie dairies do foodies gorgaons hums and iseries i love to your flashes of wit and humor throughout the book starting on the first page with your hopes that elizabeth billings donned more appropriate footwear for her attempted escape than the floral silk heals that she stole from her mistress. before i ask my questions, i'd like to share one connection that i made in reading that i was really struck by. you draw attention to the insidious ways in which women's household production was devalued as merely domestic labor and was artificially and erroneously separated from market-oriented production. this point reminded me of a wonderful documentary. called angry and nook created by aletheia arnacook buril in 2016 the film focuses on efforts to ban commercial seal hunting and those efforts have been absolutely devastating for inuit people in the canadian arctic inuit women process and prepare the skins for sale in their homes, but they're livelihood and the community survival is totally dependent on the commercial trade in seal skins. so women's textile related domestic work is part of the commercial market but the inuit are repeatedly told by activists that they are protected from negative effects of the ban by an exception that allows inuits to hunt seals for personal use the activists refusal to recognize the embracation of inuit women's domestic and commercial work struck me as a contemporary version of the illegible nature of some women's commercial textile work that you describe so beautifully in your book. my first question has a long windup. so please bear with me throughout your book you maintain a wonderful balance. i think between on the one hand recognizing the concrete social economic and legal inequalities that shape the daily lives of those without strong claims to rights or property and on the other hand illuminating the creative resourceful and often very moving ways. in which these ordinary people exercised agency in the midst of constraint in terms of concrete limits. you remind us that textiles under wrote the slave trade you emphasize as you've mentioned today that asserting property claims to textiles criminalized a huge range of property transactions as theft that it was a fragile and fleeting form of agency that was unequally available to those on the margins given race and gender restrictions, and then it did nothing to challenge the foundational racial gender and class inequities of the social order but at the same time your book highlights so many savvy important forms of quotidian agency including as one example the sutterfuge that people performed in accounting for time and labor that did not belong to them according to civil law either by committing nothing to writing or an example that i loved by tracking things in diaries or recipe books or commonplace books to prevent the property from being merged with a husband's property or an employer's property. and a second example you talk about how women's quilting circles and sewing circles and dress fittings. where as much about creating and maintaining property claims as they were about sociability or charity or the pulling of labor. your account also unsettles and challenges so many ideas that have long seemed like givens such as that married white women and enslaved people could not act as merchants or manufacturers or that people on society's margins could never expect or demand recourse to the law or that written codification of rights-based law represents unequivocal progress. and in unsettling these givens you vividly evoke realities that seem quite distant or even unimaginable today. such as in this is i think something that martha was invoking a concept of law as practice based in the customs of local communities and known widely by all as opposed to our concept of law as universal principles based in the rights of individuals, which write residing books and are is only available the trained few. if you emphasize the idea of local courts that had strong connections to the communities in which they were situated and that revolved around relationships. you emphasize the idea that public law incorporated those without rights and to its basic workings because they were part of the public body. you emphasize the idea that relationships a wee made it possible for individuals on the legal margins to act as an eye who could make claims to property. you emphasize the idea of commercial transactions as matters of relationship instead of distanced exchanges removed from social contexts. and you emphasize the idea that most people paid keen attention to the intimate details of clothing and thought of long-lasting well-made clothing as one of the most important forms of property investment. here finally is my question. so keeping in mind your admirable refusal to romanticize the past that you conjure. i'm wondering if in the course of your research you ever found glimmers of possibility or food for thought that seemed helpful for reimagining some of our current givens as a reader. i found it helpful and i dare say even hopeful. to be reminded of that ideas that now seem immutable and irrefutable are time bound and potentially ephemeral. so i found myself wondering what we might learn from the worlds you evoke in your book about contemporary possibilities for things like secondhand markets and exchanges or local economies and mutual aid or forms of local restorative even transformative justice or ways to rest clothing from its participation in exploitative labor practices and environmental devastation. so i'm wondering to what extent if any did you encounter ideas in your research that sparked your imagination about other ways that we might live in relation to clothing and also in relation to each other so very long and winding question, but but i hope it landed at a comprehensible place. right and i have one more question too. but if if it's helpful to go there first. sure, that that's that's a huge question megan and what my goodness yes, you this book is i found other people in this book. i really liked them and i found them. puzzling but i found them so incredibly admirable if they're creativity of the ways that they reimagined how they could work with the tools that they had and in this instance. it's these, you know, principles attached to textiles, but the textiles themselves they kind of reimagined who they were through their material where their relationship the relationship to these material goods and the ways that they could make these goods themselves too. it's it put not only legal agency but economic agency in their hands in a way that i found refreshing given the general presumptions that these people are kind of buffeted about by economic change and by you know the laws, country which simply exploited them and give them very little room from maneuver. what i found really fascinating was some of the things that you were pointing out with like the wii and i this idea that in fact you had to have a group of people who could support you that this was more important than this idea of an individual right for people who don't have power and so this book really made me think very clearly and kind of critically in ways that i hadn't before about the difference between power and rights. i think that right now we tend to presume that if you have right you have power and it was very clear from doing the research for this book that in this period that if you had rights, sometimes that wasn't really very useful because you didn't have the power to use them and in other instances, you know, you just didn't have rights, but you could have considerable power actually, so it made me separate these two things and textiles is the way of rethinking this right so that you know a wealthy woman who owned all kinds of clothing, but then all kinds of bed linens and textiles. she would have a group of people who knew that who could you know, actually attach those goods to her, but without that group of people those goods might move over into her husband's possessions because she was married to him coverture would place valuable property into the ambit of her husband's legal claims, but she needed that group of people around her to make sure that those that property stayed with her and this was even more important for enslaved women for instance, too, and i have a an example in the book polly who actually has a small business of our own spinning thread, but people see probably spinning the thread they see her dying the thread they know that it's her thread all of those people who know that about her they're able to help buttress her claims to this so it's not her right? it's the power that she has through those relationships and it's this creation. be that is really important. this is also important for mothers and daughters. so we've seen people have hope chests. i know this my mother had a hope chest actually my grandmother had a hope chest. hope chests are full of like bed linens and other kinds of textiles usually but i hope chest we imagine is oh, those are the kinds of just the things that women get when they get married and there's just, you know to help her set up the household and that's it. but actually this is a transfer of capital from mothers to daughters. so mothers who often control the labor of their daughters would allow the daughters to claim the fruits of their own labor what they produced in terms of textiles or sometimes what they made in other kinds of productive activities, but then purchase textiles they then took those put those textiles and trunks which actually are legal containers to the limit property. and then the daughters had capital that they could keep in the marriage. so this is not just consumer goods. this is actually capital that they have that can take a woman through difficult times and would be also removed from her husband's creditors. it's like, oh my gosh, this is actually a wee again of the mother the daughter and then people who know about this property creating secure claims to this really valuable form of capital. so it's interesting for me to think about power that way rather than right, but then think about power and creative ways to for today, right because we assume that rights will solve a whole range of problems in our society, but it may be that rights have less power to resolve those issues then this collective sense of these relationships we have to other people this sense of communal action of the ideas the public good and the power that you can get through exactly those kinds of relationships that we may have. too much in individuals and not seeing how all of this relationships and actually legal principles that attach to goods and that are created through those relationships how important those are. so that was a long-winded answer to your question, and i think there are other things in here too that i find really interesting like skill and the importance of skill and understanding value, but i'll leave it there and you ask your other question. megan back to you. wonderful. thank you. my second question has a much shorter windup, but it has two quick parts as a non-historian but in many ways i want to be historian. i found myself thinking a lot about method as i was reading your book and the first part of my question is given the many silences and gaps in the archive. i'd love to hear more about when and how you realized that you had a new different story to tell how did the story coalesce for you since so much of it goes against the grain of received wisdom? and the second part is i'd love to hear more about how you taught yourself to read. the extant materials many of which require very different kinds of literacy. i'm thinking for instance of how elizabeth bagby recorded as memoranda the transactions related to textiles that she actually produced and traded. or how rebecca kate recorded her her own work as a wife who did uncompensated domestic labor and also the wage work performed by her unmarried sister. how did you acquire the literacy for parsing these practices for what they were given how little they have been visible in the record of explanation. yeah, so elizabeth bagby for everybody else who hasn't read the book elizabeth. bagby has a memorandum book. actually. it's it's called a memorandum book. it's called a commonplace book in the archives. it's not really a commonplace book. it's just what it's labeled and she has all of her weaving accounts in this book and at the beginning though, she has a quote and i'm gonna forget the exact quote but it's basically for all the goods that belong to the household. you must keep careful account, but for the goods cheaper to produce within yourself, and essentially the goods are belong to her. it's best to keep memoranda, and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that and i looked at that for i don't know several years and then i was like, oh my gosh, she's actually talking about household accounts the goods that she produces as a wife under curvature that belonged to her husband and their creditors and then the memoranda is a way of separating out her goods and so you have account books and you have accounts because i've been looking at account books and puzzling over when women appear when they don't appear when enslave people appear when they don't appear. and it occurred to me. it's like oh those are legal records. nobody uses account books in this period to like track economic production or figure out you know, how to better your business. it is a legal record to determine who's in debt to you and who's not and how much they owe so women don't appear in there because it's a legal form where it's unnecessary generally for married women to appear or enslave people to appear because you can't sue them in civil court, which is where like account looks matter. memoranda is something else you take it in a different form. it looks different the material qualities of it are different. and so that's a memorandum. it's not an account, which means that you've separated out your property and that the memoranda establishes your connection to it, but it doesn't give creditors your husband or their creditors any claim to that. and so, you know, i don't know it's these moments where you have this tension where something doesn't make sense and it's those weird sentences and that was one of them. it's like best to keep memoranda. what does that mean and then all of a sudden we sort of when the context of the larger like account book universe it starts making more sense and then once you get that little kind of clue there just like oh then the whole chapter starts unfolding or several those chapters starting unfolding with looking at how people do track their accounts and they attract accounts verbally, which have a different kind of legal resonance. they attract counts through the material goods themselves people would bring in for instance if you accused of stealing address and then bring in the dress and say see, i didn't steal it like why would you do that? that's not very like credible evidence to me. you could still bring in the stolen dress, right? but this is all part of a logic whereby if you are claiming like your connection to it you're showing your connection to a material good then that's a way of showing that you in fact do own it and have legal claim to it. you would never bring in something that you had dolan that you don't have legal claim to because you would be hiding it and you would have actually like put it into the secondary market and got rid of it as fast as possible right to have claimed it to have kept it and then to wear it shows that you actually have this legal claim to it. so you have to start then piecing together the pieces of evidence that don't make sense and then try to like create the pattern. so i just feel like this is a puzzle and you get little pieces of the puzzle and it's gonna put this down. this is a corner piece. i think oh it is a corner piece then all the sudden other things start taking shape and with this it was really like seeing a world that i couldn't i didn't notice there and i found it really kind of exciting to piece together for instance the accounting and the ways that people are trying to hide their whole economic world because if they put it in writing and put it in certain forms, it's going to move into the hands of their masters their employers. and their fathers and i found this particularly compelling with enslaved people who are constantly hiding the forms of accounting and yet constantly depending on all of this relationships that people seeing their goods. so it's utterly public and yet we can no longer see it as historians because the evidence was kept in a way that is not saved and not visible and for a reason right so we have all of the written evidence of the economic world of the men with property who could work in civil law because that is in writing and it was saved in particular kinds of forms that now in archives and so we think that's the only thing and yet there's this whole other world out there that was documented in very different ways and we don't see that anymore to me that gets back to your first question too. it's like there are there's a whole world there that we're unaware of that we could still draw on because the possibilities to imagine economic exchange power people's relationships a lot. it's much broader in our past than what we had assumed. thank you. it's wonderful. thank you. we're now going to open this up to those in the audience. we have a hand patiently waiting to be called upon sonia michelle, you know the routine please unmute. join the conversation thank you, eric. and thank you very much laura for what sounds like a fascinating book. i ordered it while you were talking. i am. sorry. i missed the first few minutes, but um, i ordered it as soon as i heard you're talking about it. um, first of all, just let me start with a little anecdote perhaps you read in the new york times last week. there was an article about the ukrainian air force and there was one line that struck me where they described the wife of one of the pilots and he said and the article said she spends her days weaving homemade camouflage nets for the ukrainian army. that phrase was just so incredibly evocative. i don't know if you know i've abandoned history and i'm now become an artist and i immediately started working on a collage that to that evoke to me what it what the camouflage that's must look like these homemade camouflage nuts, but i do have a question or a sort of serious question. um, and i'm sorry, i didn't hear the sort of a whole overview of your book. so maybe you've already touched on this but what is the relationship between i mean throughout the 19th century what? production weaving and so forth was becoming increasingly industrialized and i wonder if that's a thread or a theme through the book and if so how that relates to this but obviously seems to be another focus of yours. that is the the individual and handmade production of textiles and then sort of going in a somewhat different direction what i was doing the wash this morning and i was thinking about laundry. what is the relationship between laundry textile production on and laundry on the one hand and textile production and women's dress making and tailoring on the other and the sort of gendering of all of those activities. i wonder if you talk about all of that in the book. and yeah, so let me do laundry first. i'd like laundering is how you rehabilitate textiles. so in laundry is really important because as actually megan i believe was saying it's a having well made. fitted clothes that are well-kept. it's like this is really important to people this is not just sort of like poor people do this because it's really meaningful to them. they're not doing it simply to you know, like to try to aspire to middle class values or anything. this is this is something that is incredibly important because it is supposed to clothing represent your inner self. and is your your inner self is expressed through your outer layers. and so this is about, you know, making a statement about your character and it is seen as really important to like tend to that and so it's not just a matter of having expensive clothing. it's a matter of keeping it up and making sure it's well fitted and well-tended and so laundry is a part of that and poor people go to extraordinary links to wander. listen to have white and then in a particular caffeine brown is written about this. john stiles is written about this. but laundering is also about adding value right? so if you think about the the metaphors and the imagery here, it's like money laundering you make it clean, but you can make clothing clean and you launder it and you turn it into a better version of itself. you're adding value that way and i found it really fascinating to think about the production of clothing laundering but also all the kinds of mending and then remaking of clothes that people do they're constantly adding value to this stuff and so it's not just making it prettier. it is in fact, you know turning making this into a more valuable item and then that's part of adding value and like exchanging it and turning into currency as well. so i feel like people are kind of printing money in some ways when they're doing this and that part we've never really kind of considered i find that to be fascinating so the industrialization part you know, that's the storyline is that that i was raised on and that i think it's still kind of central to the literature. is that the early 19th century you get the mechanization of cotton production and weaving and spinning you get the low mills and then it all is basically industrialized in the focus on is on people who work in the mill. so the presumption that basically mechanization is taking over the whole situation here when textile production but then i started looking in and it's actually way more complicated than that. so textiles are unevenly mechanized. so cotton is mechanized wool is much harder to mechanize although it is mechanized faster linen isn't really mechanized until in the late 19th or the 20th century and silk is also the weaving of it becomes mechanized but still the making of silk is actually really difficult in the weaving of it is is difficult to it's more moderately mechanized. so the other so there are all sorts of spaces. economy for hand labor, especially within in production with wool. the best wool is still done by hand in cotton production is also a lot of really fine cons. you're still done by him because the stuff that machines do isn't that great at first and then the more stuff you produce the more opportunities the art of fashion it into clothing which actually produces more hand labor and so you'll find a lot of hand labor like in the delaware river valley for instance that is growing up alongside factory labor, and this gets to that, you know, skills and value and even then if you're working in a factory skills still matter, so it's not like you just anybody can walk in there and do it, although somehow we tend to presume that and the same way that we kind of resume anybody so stuff right all when they could do that. it's like no it's actually takes a lot of skill and like really good class if it's well done. that's what makes it commercially viable. so, you know and before mechanization basically all cloth is done in the household and what distinguishes you know homespun from commercial cloth is the quality. and the quality is not something that is determined by gender women reduce quality or people can produce quality. it's protect it has nothing to do with race either it has to do with somebody's skills so women and you know enslave people free blacks all these people are concentrating oftentimes in textile hand production and also mechanized textile production, too, but textile hand production because they can basically create value with their hands, but they can also keep the value with their hands. and so i find this to be really important right? we've missed this key part of the whole explanation as to why these things are gendered, but i would argue also raised to because in fact out of all the things that you can produce out of all of your very bad options if you are a woman a poor person or a person of color in this period textile production actually provides you a way to keep at least some of what you produce and legally and this is really important. so for instance, have these letters that were in duke university. manuscripts archives and they're from women who in 1840s were working low mills. they turn all of their wages into fabric. and i find this fascinating right so they buy fabric they can buy it in low, and it's a good deal relative to where they live. they then go home and sell it and there's all this correspondence back and forth between the sisters. it's like don't tell people how much it costs at all because they want to charge more back at home. right and then they have all this other kinds of, you know directives as an i'm sending you, you know this large cut of long cut of coffee. don't cut it up. don't cut it up to sell it that will devalue it and so they're very aware here of what kinds of goods they can produce but then i'll also what kinds of value they can claim all of those women are actually unmarried but the connection of women in textiles is so close that you know, the idea that if you're a woman textiles textiles is the thing you do and you trade in that has become really ingrained by that point. so yeah, i think that piece of it is really important for understanding industrialization, but then also seeing industrialization actually increases the spaces and opportunities for skilled and labor to thank you. michael. novak. you've got a hand up, please join us. can you hear me? yes we can. okay. good afternoon. thank you for being here. my question is your talking a lot about the about the manufacturing of cloth and textiles and how it relates to people's role in the law in the economy. i was wondering if this is if this is in relating anyway if you've looked into the making of shoes and if that was similar if there was it was totally different. i don't know if you've looked at that. i'm just curious if you have if you found anything interesting. yeah, i don't actually look into the making of shoes but people claim shoes that kind of include shoes in the textile rubric which i find fascinating like i think this relates to some of martha was talking about these people are really they're very creative and it's like textiles and clothing belongs to me that handkerchiefs belong to me too and hats oh and scarves and shoes too. so, you know, basically after certain point is like well it has something to do with textiles feathers are for hats right if it passes through my hands i own it. so it's not just the clothing you wear. it's all this other stuff and so all the accessories get included in or people try to include them in and they're fairly successful in doing so although not always right so they include all those in there and so that's kind of why i have this people always ask me what are textiles. it's like, well basically it's a legal category. it's all the goods that you can include within this category in this category sort of extends out to include shoes. there is one great case with this where there's an enslaved man if you has a solid business dealing in dry goods to other encycloped people in his community and he is accused of stealing shoes. i think this also gets back to this question of i and we and so what he does is he brings out all of the enslaved customers who shop with him essentially and he has a store in it's a store of goods not an actual physical place and so he brings out all of these witnesses who one lines up and says, no the shoes that you say we're stolen he didn't have them because the shoes he was selling those shoes are really poor quality and i was looking for like better shoes. so, you know, he's saying no those weren't the shoes he had, you know, we have another person line up and say no. no, there's something else going on here. there was actually a fight about so this as they're all testifying about the goods of this man has and the fact that he has goods and is selling to other enslaved people as a way than of saying that no, he didn't actually steal the goods. it's really name because in fact they all could have been arrested for like, you know, he could be arrested for for dealing goods with enslaved people. he's not supposed to be selling but all of that became evidence of the fact that he didn't steal the shoes in question because other people saw him with a whole different array of goods, but not the shoes. so again, it was the way that he was dealing all the people surrounding him within able to ultimately save him from that theft charge and it was also interesting that the mattresses didn't really care that he was like selling shoes and other dry goods in the secondary market they were more concerned with theft, but the presumption was he could make some sort of legal claims to those goods and in fact so much so that he could even engage in selling them. so thank you up next to leon fink and then if ursula rack could stand by we'll call on you after leon. hey laura. hey leon, but here this account of what i'm sure is gonna is a great book. leon i think we've lost you. i was intrigued by your response to sonia michelle's. hello. hello, can you hear me on yes? can you hear me so we can okay. i don't know what the problem is up. in any case i was interested in the relationship laura between the world that you're describing of basically home-based textile production and industrial world of production that we're more familiar with at least as labor historians are and i was in interested in your suggestion that there's maybe an interaction between these two worlds, but one distinction seems to be that at least the is in the methods of attending to grievances in your world. it seems to be an individual and legal arena and the more industrial centers. it is a history. um, you know from through amusky through the southern mills seems to be a more collective of form of address. could you comment on that distinction and what you think might be the interactions and you think there's a whole world of labor history that might for example among even among industrial textile workers who might at the same time be involved not only in home production, but also in legal complaints that were we haven't really examined yet. yeah, you know, i was really struck. i mean i was like i said raised on that distinction between you have to household production you have the industrial production and yet a lot of the work in textile and textile history is blurring all those distinctions by pushing at least commercialization, but also the transformation of labor relations not just the commercialization back in time and putting that actually within households. so you have putting out system. you have the breakup of of independent producers and having them glumped under you know, somebody who's a merchant who's then organizing production? and skimming, you know from the top of basically they become wage workers but working in their households and often relying on household labor of women and children. so all that is happening within households, but then those people sort of move into industry into into factories, but that transition i don't think this is abrupt as what we've imagined and some of the people who are coming to the united states are like, you know, they're they're refugees from the linen industry in the british isles and the woolen industry too in the british isles. and so they're trying to get away from that system, but they're also relying on the skills then to set up shop in their own homes and often the women are the ones who are taking over that kind of labor, but then it's an easy sort of transition into some of these factory settings where it's not quite as abrupt as you see in cotton so you would have wool factories where you might be working in the factory, but you're kind of doing the same thing you'll be doing at home and some will factories are actually putting out systems. so a seth rogmans work is really interesting in this regard, but then i think your question about communal approaches that i think you're getting the wrong impression if you think i'm saying that these are individual and individualistic claims. i mean, that would be the kind of the the gloss that civil outlets on this where your frame the legal framework cashew as an individual with rights you then makes claims against another individual this is taking place in even then actually a lot of and i'm hoping the book like underscourses even then that's a legal frame and in fact all of that depends on a whole bunch of evidence that is involved with it depends on other people knowing about your property claims and be able to come and justify that and support you and all of that. so there's usually a community behind any sort of legal claim to property but then if you look at the public side that i'm talking about where people are making claims to property without rights you come in with your whole crew. sarah allingham did it actually is what sarah alham didn't do. it's what roseanna marra did so she comes in with her she and her witnesses and all these people come in and you've got to have all those folks and so there is a sense of community and collaboration in there of understanding what certain you know, a principles are in your community what sort of practices are accepted and then it's a constant effort of enforcement which involves a whole range of people and if you think about it, that's not so different from what's going on mills where like you have certain expectations about workplace practices about value of your labor about the relationships. you have at the people who are employing you and then there's collective action around that you're just going to get more collective action because you're all alone together in that factory, right? but you find the same kinds of expectations with the enforcement of the practices surrounding the exchange and ownership of excels generally, so i don't think they're as dissimilar. actually. i think there's overlap there. and i think that the framework as i said earlier like the right space framework. it's a legal framework and to mistake that with how things actually work is to like mix those things up. i mean the legal framework is not social how so people think about property. it's how the legal framework handles that and people slot their issues into that framework. and sometimes that framework is really important in the way that people start imagining things, but it's entirely different from the way people actually operate oftentimes. thank you ursula rack. you've been patiently waiting, please join us if you unmute. hello, good morning from new zealand. i'm a historian myself, and i was wondering what how was it with mains clothing, especially when they were younger and you know sons but what happened for example with the clothes when they have spent a father or yeah, the the owner of the woman died. how was that working was the clothes from the main also then in the position of the women or was only women's clothes and peddling and so on her property. thank you. so yeah, the clothes that belong to the person belong to the person so it's kind of it's not presumed then that the like a husband's clothes with them move to the wife and people are very particular about their clothes. so, you know like men are really particular about their clothes too and their wives are not their wives will like and this is kind of well established in scholarship that i did not do that wives are responsible for linens. basically, but men are like their coats and their pants they go off and do that themselves and i have a group of women coulee women who have in western virginia. you have a whole business and they they sell they be they do a bunch of different kinds of things all in textile production, but one of the sort of key customer bases is men who want really fancy coats from militia masters, and this is a thing so you have a uniform which is not actually uniform it is a uniform but there's nothing uniform about it. i also think that's kind of fascinating actually, so they all come with sort of the same style but different colors they want braids and they want epileps and they want, you know buckets and they need little trimmings over here. and so they do this, you know, they do the coats and the guys are really picky about what it looks like and they come in for fittings. just great. so there is this attachment of people to you know, the clothes that they wear that way and so within families, yes, it's it's the in the children's clothes are there's the wives closer there's and then the other textiles that they're able to kind of account for in their community in the community knows that they're theirs so there's this concert sort of sorting around that way but yes, the men's clothes don't automatically go to the wife the wife does not automatically own everything that's in the household it is she has to establish those claims just to work really hard to establish those clients. thank you. we have a question in the q&a her hand also went up but then it went down. so at least i have the question and i will pose it on behalf of kyra haynes who writes as someone who is doing their senior thesis on victorian fashion. could you talk about your research process and what it was like and what sources you relied upon for your research? so this is where i martha has. like listen to me talk about this research forever and ever and the research process was was long and arduous. i feel like i was doing this when i didn't know i was doing it so i started kind of like collecting stuff about textiles when i was doing my dissertation with him nothing to do with textiles. i just got distracted by it. so i've been collecting this for a very long time and i didn't really see how that off it together until or how i was gonna fit together until recently, but i've looked at court cases local court cases. i've looked at federal court cases. i think it's state court cases. i've looked at account books. i've looked at correspondence about clothing. this is not the kind of book that i looked at the material artifacts themselves. and so this is not really the kind of book that i could have done. early in my career. i think it's three. you're very privileged you accumulate things over time and in you're able to have these longer term projects and this is definitely one of those if i had just and i actually had a crisis of conscience and faith or i don't know method maybe would be a better way to put it when i was doing footnotes for an article recently and they said i cited a collection of court cases and they said no we need specific court cases that prove this point and the point i was making was about the legal qualities of trunks. so trunks are legal container for people who don't own their own houses. and so i had tons of cases on trunks hundreds of cases and trunks and i didn't know what trunks meant and then one day it occurred to me as i was looking at the hundreds of cases of trunks cases on trucks that that people were referring to trunks as a way to demarcate the property is theirs and it had definitely legal qualities and in fact you search warrants for trunks for instance. so i was stuck because i'm like am i supposed to cite the several hundred cases on trunks that i have because if you look at any one case you don't see the point it would just refer to a trunk and you would walk by that case like i had walked by those cases. it was just that i happened to make notes about trunks because i don't know i was like doing something verbatim, you know like transcription of the court record. so i didn't know what to do exactly because this is through practice and it's through repetition of these things. and so this gets looking to megan's question about method. it's like you have to look at this for a very long time and you have to look at it over and over and over and over and this is us that i think what you know, martha's comment too is about it's like this is about practice the way that it becomes law is if you do it over and over and over and over so it makes it really difficult to explain citations to folks because they're expecting the court case that establishes the principle and there's no one court case that does that in this instance. it's just the repetition and so you kind of have to hang in there long enough to get the repetition in persistent. so this works, but that's kind of difficult if you're like doing a senior thesis for instance. you don't have the time to do that. but if you could just elaborate a little bit more so you've had many years of experience with these records and the issues that you're dealing with. and so this is in the back of your mind it stays there and that allows you to see eventually things that you didn't see before, but you said terrific phrase seeing a world that i didn't know was there and i just i'd love that that phrasing but as a legal historian who is interested both in the law, but in the real people and the social relations that the law can help illuminate, it's safe to say that you're diving into the world of legal cases allows you to recreate that kind of broader social world and the dynamic and the relationships between people so these cases are about more than principle and outcomes, but they do allow you to see and then reconstitute this world that you didn't know was there. yeah, and it's like it's it's true. yes, and it's true. but if you look at like local court cases and martha feel free to lay in here on local court cases. so you get little fragments. it's like i have a paragraph and it will say, you know, so until ellen stoled something out of sue's trunk. and sue said it was in her. she hadn't closed the lid and i'm like, what is this about so you have them another case? it's about a you know, somebody else told something that's a list of stuff from a truck and you get another little phrase. you don't get much though. so it is about the repetition and so like for instance with trunks i realized you repetition that you keep the lid open then you've not reduced. what's in the trunk to your possession. this is important if you are enslaved or servant in a house because you could be accused of stealing something of your masters and mistresses is found in the trunk, but then you say the lid was open so you hadn't reduced it to your possession if you close the lid then you're in you're in like territory there where you you've claim the goods as your own because you've closed the lid. still gray though because you just closed it. you could open it back up which means that your master and mistress could come back in and then take whatever it is that they're accused of stealing out of the trunk if you close the lid and lock it then you've reduced this to your possession because you've made it so that is a container that nobody else can get into? understanding that though took me like hundreds of cases to figure it out. right? so and there's no one case that says ha the principle of the open trunk lid and so it is those legal cases the local cases in particular. are you just have to handle them differently than you would like a state or federal case where there are dealing with the principle of law and the point is to state that and here they're like, they're not and they're they're hiding this from kind of martha you could weigh in on this too. i think just push us a little bit, you know to say that you know what i think i've learned from you, but i don't want to speak for you. but what i've what i've taken from your work is the mistake we make is thinking that what law is is text that law is doctrine that laws the constitution that law is the common law as it is articulated and iterated over time. that is not law that law is requires for historians. yes and understanding of the text but ultimately the history of law is what people do with the text and how people in their practices produce the text and that is so it's to say that the distinction as if somehow there's law and then sort of mixing with laws something like i don't know social or cultural political history is sort of misses. i think the intervention because the intervention is to say that's a false distinction and that actually the history of law is the history of how parties people societies and more make meaning and how meaning changes over time how meaning is produced over time. so maybe i've overstated it laura, but that's a way to just sort of force the point i guess. yeah. thanks martha that just thank you. and yes and part of the point of this book too is to show kind of changes in that over time because we kind of take the institutional history of courts for granted. we kind of assume that there is this thing law it works in a certain way and you know, you got the higher court you got the lower courts, and it's always like that and part of this is to mess with people's heads about this to change our understanding of this history and so like a whole chapter on overlapping jurisdictions and overlapping bodies of law in the you know, the decades following the revolution and so it's even more important in the late 18th and early 19th century in the united states where they're different jurisdictions where they're different bodies of law where there is less coordination of all of that and so there is also a real sense that you can create principles to practice and so as martha was saying it's not that this practice and somehow then we have law over here. it's that the principles you can see and create through the practice and those principles have as much kind of legal traction as what is in a written text and over the course of this period though. you also do see that certain elements of written texts acquire more attraction and more power and authority within the legal system and those tend to be about right space laws based where you get more about procedure. so for instance in local court cases with all the women who bring in their textiles and say look i know and i bought it here and i did this and i'm wearing it and you understand all of that starts giving way to more procedural-based cases or cases based and procedural rights. so the questions would be more about well, you know was the door locked or not because that would be about whether it's breaking and entering or whether they're just entered and you get this more sort of formalized right space system that starts 15 a lot of these local cases and the written law and particular kinds of written laws that are taught in law schools that are then elevated in this period as being the primary source of law that's part of the, you know, the developments that are happening as well. so, you know, the reason why we go there is because of this period where that kind of law acquires more meaning and authority and it starts taking it more space and people start arguing that the written texts are actually really more important than the practices themselves and we've forgotten then that those practices used to have real legal traction and they still do in a lot of ways because even to this day, you know brown people to education is a great example. it's about practice people are constantly in supreme court cases talking about us supreme court case is talking about practice history. what used to be originalism is in fact about you know this idea about what the practices actually were in the past, so we still also give practice a lot of space and law and we don't always i think recognize that but we don't see the real space it had in the 19th century and we don't see it as creating law in the way that it did in that period thank you. you tell many stories. in the book the very diverse set of characters you end the book with perhaps the best-known name of mary todd lincoln if you could just say just a few words about that example and what it reveals and how and why you end the book with her experience. yeah. it was a revelation for me that mary todd lincoln produced a national crisis by trying to sell her clothes that she wore while she was, you know, the president. i'm like, wow, so this to me is this example of how clothing loses it's legal valence and becomes more like simply a consumer item and if it's a consumer item that is simply your second skin and especially in the post emancipation period to sell your second skin is akin to selling yourself and this is the way that then you know merit i think is just completely ridicule than the national press for she's such bad page. she's selling herself. herself. she's like a prostitute. and in fact always sold their clothes. this was their capital. this is what they have entire secondhand clothing store set up. i most main streets in america to handle exactly this kind of thing. and yeah it is cast in a very different way as a consumer good not something that is legally legible and legally important for people to do and the real important part of this as well. is that caught in the midst of all of this is a list of calculate. he was married totally consumede and she has an entire business set up which is not just being a seamstress but it is designing and fashioning clothing and making it for you know, washington's easily women so her carefully design garments are then held up ridicule by the entire country and then basically all of the labor and the skill that was brought into that is also erased as these goods become simply consumer goods. why don't you sell your old clothes just go buy new ones who has old clothes anyway, and she never recovered. luckily, she didn't get her business back. it was just erasure of her her skill and also the legal asked the legal qualities of clothing too that you know made them actually forms the currency in capital that women sold all the time and the poor people encycloped people had sold all the time and so it is this really sad. i need to the story too because you know, this is supposed to emancipation period this is when we're going to enact the 14th amendment. nobody gets rid of coverture at that point married on this property acts do not get rid of coventure and elizabeth keckley is going to be in a very different position than african-american men in this period and then even then african american men. well they do is like dylan penningross new book is going to be about all this. there's still is a lot of ability for african americans to claim property, but we've not fully considered the ways that men and women's relationship to property is very different based on the different trajectory of the extension of rights, but then also the erasure of these other ways of claiming property and megan this may get back to your point as well is that we're so accustomed to thinking this property is an individual possession that we also can't imagine different ways of owning using regulating property that it could be for the public good that it could be about communities of people that they're different ways and they're different ways of making claims on the productive capacity of that property to beyond simply those of individuals and absolute ownership that we imagine today. so thank you. i unfortunately have to draw this to a close because our designated time is up, but i do want to express my sincere. thanks to laura marthamy name i. i'm a professor of american religious history at yale university and it's my privilege to serve as moderator for this panel today. this session asks how national state and local governments have sought to manage religious diversity throughout american history. together these panelists tell a story of how us state actors working within seemingly secular realms like us military governance health care and taxation created an unstated religious policy that defined some religions as marginal. and others as mainstream in three different case studies, they show how religious communities have sometimes challenged this policynd

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