| The published research cited in this volume recalls how much the concerns of historians of the American West have widened over the last half century. When Oscar O. Winther compiled the first edition of his bibliography of articles in periodicals on the history of the trans-Mississippi West, published in 1942, he drew on thirty-eight historical journals and four journals of political science, sociology, and general social science.1 In second and third editions, published in 19612 and 1970,3 historical journals increased to forty-three and forty-nine, while other journals, still the same four in 1961, increased to ten in 1970, adding coverage in economics, American Studies, literature, and folklore. Twenty-five years later, although the authors of these essays confine their citations to articles in periodicals to those that report significant research not represented in books, they draw also on serials in law, geography, ecology, urban studies, women's studies, ethnic studies, popular culture, the history of technology, urban history, and other fields. |
| The authors might have cast their nets still more widely. As studies that they cite indicate, readers who propose to go much beyond general surveys should look into work of legal historians, architects, urban planners, rural sociologists, demographers, anthropologists, and agricultural economists among members of other disciplines, and into publications of government agencies as well as of academically sponsored and recognized organizations. The published dictionary catalog of the Library of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at Berkeley, for instance, conveniently indexes published materials on the social and economic history of the West, most fully on agriculture in California and its neighbors but extending over the entire country and including bulletins of the United States and state departments of agriculture and agricultural |
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