Laura Edwards came to my Legal History Workshop class today to talk about her book, “The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South.”
Edwards’ presentation was fascinating, which is typical for this semester’s workshops, but the best part of the workshop was the question-and-answer session:
Jill: “I wonder about the rights of white men who didn’t have property, you know, those who didn’t own land or slaves…the itinerant farmers…”
Edwards: “Yes. We call them ‘poor white trash’…”
Jill: “I WAS TRYING TO BE POLITICALLY CORRECT!”
Buhaha. Edwards keeps it real.
Other funny moments in today’s workshop were more about Edwards’ timing and inflection:
Edwards: “In South Carolina we had all these different ethnicities – Irish, French Catholic, French Protestant, Scott, English – and people traveling were amazed that these people got along because in Europe they shot at each other…”
Edwards: “At one point I thought I had six different cases, with six different defendants. But when I said the defendant’s name aloud I realized that I had six different spellings of a single defendant’s name! The problem was there was no standard spelling, and all these spellings depend on the speaker and writer – whether they were French, Irish, and well, no one could understand the Scottish! Not even the English…”