The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 84, July 1980 - April, 1981 Page: 257

Book Reviews

the subsequent attempts to reopen the route. Especially valuable to the
reader are the discussions of Mexican efforts to lay out a San Diego-
Yuma route and a trail to San Bernardino via the San Gorgonio Pass.
The familiar story of the mountain men and the invasion during the
Mexican War concludes the presentation.
Professor Hague writes with great charm and knows how to tell a
good story. And the drama of the Southwest is such that the book makes
for interesting and even enjoyable reading, particularly for those who
are not borderlands specialists. The comment is made that "good paper
and ink outlast the human body or the memory of human exploits" (p.
98). The author apparently uses this comparison as his inspiration.
Throughout the book good drama comes before historical interpreta-
tion. Diaries, reports, and travel accounts are accepted uncritically.
One looks in vain for some discussion of the effects of the Spanish
presence upon the Indians or the impact of the Anglo upon the His-
panic. Neither does the author seem to grasp the impact of all of the
explorers upon the delicate balance of the natural environment in the
desert.
This reviewer was disappointed in the quality of the maps-in the
past, good maps were the distinctive mark of an Arthur H. Clark book.
This time, however, the multiplicity of lines criss-crossing the maps
creates confusion.
California State University, Fullerton WARREN A. BECK
Southern Women in the Recent Educational Movement in the South.
By A. D. Mayo. Edited by Dan T. Carter and Amy Friedlander.
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Pp. 309.
Preface, introduction, letter of transmittal, index. $17.50.)
Some reprints of nineteenth-century monographs are antiques-
charming, but little more than curiosities of a bygone epoch. Others
evoke the age from which they originate. They remind us of the world
outlook of nineteenth-century Americans, or they recount the history
of their time. Still other monographs are timeless, with prose neither
stilted nor jaded and with ideas ever fresh and stimulating. Southern
Women in the Recent Educational Movement in the South is not
timeless. Yet neither is it simply an antique. A. D. Mayo was a careful
historian of education in the post-Civil War South. Of more interest
than the factual material which he compiled, however, is the com-

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