 In an 1897 magazine article and again in his 1903 Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois innovated by using a term already in currency—and with multiple associations in a variety of literary, philosophical, and scientific discourses—in a distinctive and original way to name a theretofore largely unremarked phenomenon. The innovation was part of an account of a form of life-experience that he ascribed to “black folk” in America generally in then-current social circumstances—Jim Crow in the south, de facto segregation in the North, and the threat and actuality of racist violence throughout the country. 