In one of James's best-known stories, “The Middle Years” (1893), the mortally ill author Dencombe, staying at Bournemouth for the sake of what remains of his health, gets an advance copy of his latest – and almost certainly his last – novel, which is called The Middle Years. Looking over what might have been thought to be his finished and dismissed work on his clifftop bench, Dencombe revises it:

Dencombe was a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself. His ideal would have been to publish secretly, and then, on the published text, treat himself to the terrified revise, sacrificing always a first edition and beginning for posterity and even for the collectors, poor dears, with a second.

The disintegration of the American Communist Party in the Cold War years is normally ascribed to the repression mounted by most liberals together with the McCarthyites, followed by the general crisis of the international communist movement in 1956 provoked by de-Stalinization and the invasion of Hungary. The recent new histories of the CPUSA, which deal primarily with the 1930s, have replaced the view of the Party as an essentially passive agent directed by Moscow and filled with powerhungry leaders and politically-innocent members by one which sees it as composed of politically-conscious ordinary Americans who were active elements in a society in which they were rooted. This new perspective, which accepts communism as a legitimate part of the United States experience, for the most part sees CP developments in the thirties as constructive.

In recent years historians have begun to show considerable interest in the legal history of the South. But while much of this interest has touched on Southern lawyers and notions of professionalization, scant attention has been paid to the scores of black lawyers who were admitted to the bar in the post-Civil War period. Who were these men? Where did they acquire their legal training and at what cost? What sort of practices did they run? How successful were they? What follows is an attempt to answer some of these questions, taking as a case study the state of South Carolina, cradle of secession, and, by any measure, one of the most conservative (and recalcitrant) Southern states during the Reconstruction and Redemption periods.

Albert Chavannes is not a name that is mentioned often in intellectual histories of the United States in the late nineteenth century. Few nowadays are familiar with the work of this émigré farmer and businessman who lived for most of his life in Knoxville, Tennessee. Yet his achievement was impressive. Between 1883 and 1885 he edited and published The Sociologist, which was possibly the first monthly journal of its kind in the U.S.A. Inspired by Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888), and the nationalist movement which resulted from it, he also wrote utopian fiction in two books, The Future Commonwealth (1892) and its sequel In Brighter Climes (1895). In the first of these novels Chavannes synthesized Darwinian theories of evolution and secular notions of progress to suggest that scientific sociological inquiry could aid rational planning in the cause of perfecting society. In the sequel, he built a firmer bridge from this dynamic sociology to a form of naive Marxism. Chavannes's work thus colours with European ideas and influences that distinctive American utopian tradition which retains a nostalgic faith in the realization of Jefferson's millennial democratic vision.