Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (review)

The Center for Great Plains Studies has produced a broadly conceived and wide-ranging reference work that brings together a multitude of disciplinary perspectives on a single region. Wishart has assembled twenty-seven topical chapters, from "Agriculture" and "Architecture" to "Literary Traditions," "Music," and "Water." Chapters open with introductory essays of five to seven pages by an expert in the field and then offer alphabetical encyclopedia entries, each signed by its author. Most chapters include forty to sixty entries. The boundaries of the Great Plains in this context follow the front range of the Rockies, from Roswell, New Mexico, through Denver and Cheyenne, and swing west to include Billings, Montana, and Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta. The eastern boundary, always more problematic, captures Winnipeg before dropping southward along the eastern border of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas and then swinging west again through Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth. Omitted from the formal Great Plains are tallgrass prairie portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and eastern Oklahoma. The editorial staff has done an excellent job of addressing the multinational aspects of the region, with full integration of both Canadian and U.S. portions of the Great Plains and consistent inclusion of Native Americans.

The core value of this encyclopedia lies in the quality of the more than 1,300 individual entries by authors who are often well published on the topics that they summarize. Great Plains scholars will recognize Thomas Isern, Dan Flores, John Hudson, John Opie, R. Douglas Hurt, Leslie Hewes, and Allan Bogue, to name a few historians. Younger scholars, such as Pekka Hamalainen and Theodore Binnema, are represented as well. The able entries identify the two or three best publications on their topics. Though generally authoritative, entries are not always easy to find. The topical chapter organization does away with a conventional encyclopedia's A–Z arrangement, making it cumbersome to locate some entries. Where is the entry for Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka? Is it in "African Americans," "Law," or "Protest and Dissent"? Solving this problem requires a search through the volume's index. Cross-references within chapters help, but two searches are often necessary to find one entry.

According to the work's introduction, the thematic organization brings an interpretive function lacking in most encyclopedias. This ambition is best realized in Michael Conzen's stellar essay introducing the "Cities and Towns" chapter and in Bret Wallach's nuanced, interpretive, and remarkably readable summary of the "Physical Environment." The editorial effort to guide Great Plains scholarship is most evident in the five chapters focused on racial and ethnic culture groups ("African Americans," "Asian Americans," "European Americans, "Hispanic Americans," and "Native Americans") and in the chapter entitled "Gender." Wishart says, "In doing this, we wanted to emphasize the contributions of these peoples—contributions that have often been overlooked—to the shaping of the Great Plains" (xi). The effort is only partially successful. The introductory essay by Malcolm Yeung and Evelyn Hu-DeHart is not likely to convince skeptics that Asian Americans merit a chapter of their own. It reports that Chinese populations peaked in 1890, when 224 Chinese lived in Nebraska. The 2000 Census map shows only 11 of some 500 U.S. plains counties with more than 3 percent Asian Americans, and the chapter includes only 21 entries.

The chapter on "European Americans" suffers from another problem. Aidan McQuillan provides a strong and useful introductory essay about European immigrants to the Great Plains and their lasting cultural imprints. The chapter contains entries about Czechs, Danes, Germans, Icelanders, etc., who moved into the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is omitted is any significant discussion of Euro-American immigrants from the East. The hundreds of thousands of families who moved into the plains from eastern states and provinces are completely neglected. The few hundred African Americans who migrated from the Old South to Kansas after the Civil War receive careful treatment, but not the multitudes of white...