The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 106, July 2002 - April, 2003 Page: 328

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

areas of sociology, education, health care, music and the visual arts, film, videos,
and politics as well as African American history. Several thousand books, articles,
theses, and dissertations are included in the more than six-hundred-page text,
making this by far the most extensive bibliography on the topic. For this reason
alone it is a very useful reference resource for students and scholars.
The value of bibliographies depends on several factors, including thorough-
ness and accuracy of coverage, organization and accessibility of information, and
the extent and usefulness of annotative material. On the whole Junne does a
good job covering the topic. Students of Texas history will be especially pleased
with the extensive material provided on the Lone Star State. Still, there are some
questions about the way Junne defined the scope of his project. For example,
why include material on Canada, especially eastern Canada, in a bibliographical
study on the American West? Secondly, why cover music and the visual arts, but
not literature and poetry? Finally, there are occasional inconsistencies in the se-
lection of material. For example, an obscure 1972 M.A. thesis from Texas South-
ern University is cited (p. 535), while a more significant recent Ph.D.
dissertation on black labor on the Texas Gulf Cost is omitted.
On the whole, the bibliography is effectively organized and it is relatively easy
to find material. The first quarter of the book is organized topically; within each
topic entries are divided into sections of articles, books, and theses and disserta-
tions. The remainder of the book is organized geographically by state; the chap-
ters on the larger states are further subdivided by city. One of the more valuable
features is the list of African American newspapers that is appended to most state
sections. Accessing material is facilitated by an excellent index of authors; the
subject index, on the other hand, is less thorough and less useful. While the book
title suggests that the bibliography is "selectively annotated," Junne makes it clear
that annotations are used only when the title of an entry does not clearly indicate
its subject. This was a wise decision. Thorough annotation would have either
doubled the length of the book or greatly reduced the number of works cited.
Junne indicates that his goal was to provide an up-to-date catalogue of the re-
sources available on the role of African Americans in the history and develop-
ment of the American West that will assist students and scholars in conducting
further research on this topic. He has largely succeeded in this endeavor.
Texas Southern University Cary D. Wintz
The Natural West: Envzronmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. By
Dan Flores. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 200oo1. Pp. xii+285. Illus-
trations, acknowledgments, introduction, appendix, notes, bibliography, in-
dex. ISBN o-8o61-33o4-X. $29.95, cloth.)
It is rare that collections of previously published essays work better than the
individual essays themselves. The Natural West does. Dan Flores has gone back a
decade or more in his career and pulled together ten seminal essays on the envi-
ronment of the Plains and Rocky Mountains. Editing and updating them with
new introductions, conclusions, internal text, and notes, Flores acknowledges

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