The New Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Howard R. Lamar, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1998, $60.
Subscribing to the broadest definition of the American West, this one-volume encyclopedia covers not only the major events and personalities of the trans-Mississippi West but also the “western,” or frontier, stage of all those places east of the mighty Mississippi…and it does so in just 1,324 pages. Back in 1977, Howard Lamar’s The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West first delighted readers by packaging nearly everything most of them wanted to know about the West in one fact-packed volume. That valuable, handy (if you didn’t have to lift it too many times) source of information has now been revised and expanded. The New Encyclopedia of the American West has 2,400 entries from 300 contributors (up from 200 contributors) and four times as many illustrations and maps (which, according to someone else’s math, means there are now more than 600). The book has been revised but is not a revisionist work. “The Encyclopedia seeks a broad coverage of the frontier and the West by including older interpretations by distinguished western historians and revisionist interpretations by new scholars,” writes Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and a past president of the Western Historical Association. “I made no attempt to pursue any single reading of the western experience and did not urge authors to do so. Authors were asked, if providing a revisionist interpretation of a real or fictional person or event, to explain the older assessment as well.”
