Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2000
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2000, pp. 77-78.
Abstract
The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Yale historian Howard Lamar and published by Thomas Y. Crowell Company in 1977, was a pretty good book, bringing to the American public the first comprehensive single-volume treatment of the history of the West. But that reference work has now been superseded-and dwarfed-by this new rendition, also edited by Lamar. More than 1250 pages of three-column text, 1.5 million words in all, are given over to 2400 alphabetically ordered entries written by more than three hundred scholars. Long thematic entries, on the fur trade or railroads, for example, are interspersed with shorter pieces, often on individuals. Six hundred photographs and a good number of maps augment a readable text. A bibliography at the end of most entries points the reader to additional sources; there is some cross-referencing of entries, though not enough; and there is an index, but only of the names of persons (there was no index at all in the 1977 edition). All in all, this is a handsome, informative, engaging book-well worth the asking price. It rightfully takes its place alongside the rival four-volume Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod (1996), as the best reference works on the West.
The New Encyclopedia, like its predecessor, is ambitious in both conception and scope: in conception, because it includes the West as process, a frontier stage occurring across the entire United States, as well as the West as a place, the western half of the country; in scope, because among its entries are old favorites of western history, such as wars, politics, and gunfighters, but also more recent concerns, such as gender, ethnicity, and environment. So, for example, there is an entry on Plymouth Rock and another on the early settlement of Vermont, but only states of the West get the full treatment with coverage of their histories from early settlement through to the present. This is a logical way of dealing with the ambiguous meaning of the West, but the complexity of the arrangement, mixing temporal and spatial parameters, causes some confusion, as is evident in the entries on Physiography and Vegetation, two of the longest essays in the book. Whereas the former deals with the physiography of the entire country, the latter covers only the vegetation of the Western United States, suggesting what? That the shape of the land was more important to settlers than the availability of wood?
The selection of entries and their content tell a good deal about the way scholarship on the West has developed since the 1977 version. Interpretive essays on African Americans (Negroes in the first edition), Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans have been expanded, new entries (Prostitution on the Frontier, for instance) have been added, and many more have been revised. To the editor's credit, however, Frederick Jackson Turner and his Frontier Thesis are not shunned or castigated, as is the fashion in some of the New Western History. (It is hard to understand why Turner has been so lambasted for being a product of his times, when, after all, the New Western Historians, also products of their times, will surely be eventually disregarded too.) A concern with the historiography of the West, as well as its actual lived history, is apparent throughout The New Encyclopedia in the large number of entries on historians, including Walter Prescott Webb, Dale L. Morgan, Angie Debo, and, deservedly, Lamar himself.
Comments
Copyright 2000 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln