Anne Twitty is an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi, where she specializes in the history of slavery, law, and nineteenth-century America more broadly. Her forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press, Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857, uses the collection of nearly 300 freedom suits filed in the St. Louis circuit court to construct a legal history of slavery and slaveholding in the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri river valleys. Her next project will explore the efficacy of gradual emancipation statutes adopted in the aftermath of the American Revolution.