Historians and the American West ed. by Michael P. Malone (review)

Reviews 157 all too often, moves from wit and satire to sarcasm and flippancy. Even more annoying, Shadows of the Indian tends to avoid critical considerations in favor of the comic. The book moves from one humorous “for instance” to another, with little thought given as to how the examples relate. While this “listing” is valuable, the reader is left with a great many examples from a great many sources and little else. While the academic community may find Shadows of the Indian of some minor interest, the tenor of the narrative, the profusion of illustrations, and its glossy superficiality suggest that the book is best directed towards a more general and popular audience where it may find a limited measure of success. TOM KING, University of Lethbridge Historians and the American West. Edited by Michael P. Malone. Foreword by Rodman W. Paul. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983, 449 pages, $24.95.) This is an excellent book from which all students of the western Ameri­ can scene can benefit. It is of course most useful, even essential, to the western historian, but there is much here for other specialists and generalists to appre­ ciate and enjoy. It summarizes the past and present historiography of some seventeen topics in the field of western history, including such traditional subjects as Indians, the fur trade, mining, and ranching, but also extending to the themes of western violence, environmentalism, urbanism, women, ethnic minorities and cultural studies. Capably edited and placed in a mean­ ingful intellectual context in an introductory essay by Michael Malone, these essays are valuable for their extensive bibliographies alone as well as for the sophisticated insights which many of them provide. It is customary to describe such collections as “uneven,” since some offerings are inevitably better than others. This volume is no exception, but all of the essays are at least adequate, even good, and some are genuinely out­ standing. Readers of this journal will not be surprised to find “Shifting Interpretations of Western Cultural History” by Richard Etulain placed in the latter category, even though much of what he says will strike them as familiar rather than innovative. Since the purpose of this book is mainly to summarize and comment upon the “state of the art” in each research field, however, specialists should not regard such familiarity with contempt. What is wanted are shrewd insights into the implications of research strategies and findings, past and present, and it seems to me that the last four essays in the book — Thomas Alexander’s on Mormons, Sandra Myres’s on women, Frederick Luebke’s on ethnic minorities and Etulain’s— contain the most trenchant of such insights. Only two essays strike me as a bit thin — Gilbert Fite on farmers and stockmen and F. A. Coombs on twentieth-century politics — and the authors of both have the most impossible tasks. They have to make sense out of topics 158 Western American Literature that are vast and very disparate and upon which enormous amounts have been written, but little synthesized. Perhaps we should be grateful for the generali­ zations which they do provide. The other essays on Indians (early and recent), Spanish Borderlands, fur trade and exploration, manifest destiny, nineteenth-century politics, violence, and urbanism seem more manageable and are models of their genre. Each is written by an acknowledged specialist in his field and all are characterized by the unfailing virtue of analyzing hundreds of books and articles on their subjects without degenerating into mere catalogues. All of the authors are adept at pointing out the deficiencies of existing research in their fields as well as their colleagues’ attainments. The most common complaints are overreliance on Turner, failure to use modern methodologies and insights from other disciplines, and failure to come to grips with twentieth-century events. The book provides no panacea for these ills, but it makes us understand them better, and for that alone we can be thankful for this timely and important work. JACKSON K. PUTNAM California State University, Fullerton Native American Renaissance. By Kenneth Lincoln. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1983. 313 pages, $22.50.) The “Native American Renaissance” which Kenneth...