The editors of the present volume, both of Columbia University, offer this encyclopedia as “a book to be read for enjoyment and—like the famous encyclopedia of the eighteenth-century philosophes—for enlightenment.” Both pleasure and instruction are likely to come, for the editors—and the Society of American Historians, which sponsored it—are devoted to “the writing of history as literature” and make no apologies for addressing a general audience of literate readers in a style that, on the whole, will cause no pain.
But given the sheer heft of the book, you won’t be able to read it in bed, the volume resting comfortably on your chest. This massive compendium is both a reference work, for the occasional tracking down of facts, and a collection of essays (some of them quite long) on virtually every aspect of American history. The list of some four hundred contributors, experts in their several fields, is indeed distinguished—Martin J. Marty on religion, Dee Brown on Indians, Hilton Kramer on modern painting and sculpture, Alan Brinkley on the New Deal. And the book’s system of cross-referencing, its bibliographies, and its index will earn the gratitude of every reader.
Short pieces of about one thousand words (“Erie Canal,” “Pony Express”) are interspersed with longer essays on such subjects as “Labor,” “Revolution,” “Suffrage,” and “Urbanization.” Moreover, some four hundred entries are devoted to American biography—Jack London, Sandra Day O’Connor, I. M. Pei, Aaron Copland—and all the presidents (“even,” the editors remark, “Millard Fillmore”). In this category the