It may well be that the present will stand as a golden age in the historiography of American business and American law. Both fields have flourished – indeed, flowered – in recent years. Perhaps the best measure of this is the fact that the 1978 winners of the Bancroft Prize in American History were Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business and Morton J. Horwitz's The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860, each a notable work in its own right, each a summation of sorts of the recent evolution of its field of historical inquiry.

No conviction has been more a part of the standard interpretation of American history in the twentieth century than the belief that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of late-nineteenth-century decisions bearing on government-business relations, reflected the conservative reaction that seemed to mark the depression of the 1890s. But Professor McCurdy demonstrates that in its 1895 decision in the case of United States v. E. C. Knight Company, which drew a distinction between manufacturing and trade in defining interstate commerce, the Court was not trying to shield a vast, monopolistic aggregation of wealth (Henry O. Havemeyer's “Sugar Trust”) from the will of the people that it be broken up under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The decision, in fact, was not the beginning of a conservative reaction, but the last effort in a thirty-year attempt to maintain a role for state jurisdiction over the behavior of chartered enterprises.

It is a truism of American constitutional history that the federal judiciary was expected to facilitate interstate commerce. The right of individuals to remove cases to a federal court from locally prejudiced state courts was recognized under a wide range of circumstances. But it seemed less and less natural, as more and more of the nation's business came to be transacted by the “trusts” on a national basis, for corporations to be accorded the same rights. Professor Freyer shows that a major campaign, which had some success in the 1880s, was mounted to deny corporations the right of escape to federal courts. In the end, however, the nation's lawmakers recognized that the problem of the growing concentration of capital would have to be solved by something more sophisticated than frontier justice.

“Gold is where you find it,” said the old prospector. It has long been recognized, in one way or another, that it belongs to him who can find it and extract it, and that the rules of land tenure and use formed in an agrarian society would serve poorly to define legal rights. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the demand for gold was particularly high. Its vital significance to American economic growth is revealed in the fact that the chronic foreign trade deficit of the United States in these years was balanced by two main elements: capital imports and gold exports. Professor Libecap shows just how pragmatic Americans could be about the impact of economics upon law under such circumstances, and draws a picture of a land use code that proved as malleable as the glittering metal it called forth.

Last December the Manuscripts Department of Baker Library issued a new edition of its collections guide entitled, Manuscripts in Baker Library, A Guide to Sources for Business, Economic and Social History. Although this is the fourth edition of its List of Business Manuscripts, the changed title reflects what is felt to be the broadened scope of the collections and their more varied use. Earlier editions appeared in 1932 (minus an index), 1951, and 1969. As before, the new volume is a complete listing of holdings, not just a supplement covering additions since 1969. Even with a few removals, additions come to an even 100 collections, for a total of 1403, as compared with 1303 in the previous edition.