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.'sThe Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Businessand Morton J. Horwitz'sThe 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.