Forty pounds seems a modest price for this brimming cornucopia of western history. The American West, broadly speaking, is taken to mean the frontier stage of each state and the trans-Mississippi West in general. Here are to be found potted biographies of the pioneers, politicians, writers and others who played a role in the story of the West, and accounts of the various peoples who lived there, from the Indian tribes of every region through the Basques who developed shepherding around Los Angeles to the Mormons who made their way to Great Salt Lake Valley. There are entries for the myriad features that came to be associated with the West, such as barbed wire, the cattle town, the motion picture industry and the National Park Service. Every Western buff, specialist academic and decent reference library will want a copy of this volume.

This is a new encyclopedia because it replaces that published in 1977 as The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West , also edited by Howard R. Lamar. A major stimulus to this enlarged version has been the massive burst of writing on the American West over the last generation. What is known as the "new Western history" has drawn attention to the range of ethnic and "minority" groups in the West, and has replaced the notion of the frontier as an interface between "savagery and civilisation" with one in which different cultures made contact, if often by a process of conquest. Recent accounts have emphasised the power of an implacable entrepreneurial capitalism, as they have also explored environmental and ecological dimensions. Reflecting such new approaches here are entries on "prostitution on the frontier", the "Chicano liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s", and the "environmental history of the West".

Lamar has coralled an impressive cast of contributors - historians, geographers, anthropologists and others - to provide authoritative entries, and has covered an imaginative range of topics. More than human life is here. While climate is overlooked, one of the longest essays is on the "physiography of the United States", which essentially sits on a massive granitic slab, and the vegetation that adorns that slab is also described in detail. The bluegrass region of Tennessee turns out to be larger than that of Kentucky. Many of the fauna receive entries of their own, such as the mule which pulled the immigrant wagons and the grizzly bear which once roamed from the Mississippi to the Pacific. And human creations are here in abundance - the aerospace industry, ghost towns, railroads, western music, the Wild West show.

If the length of references in the index is a guide, American presidents have enjoyed a disproportionate influence in the history of the West. This at least accords with the emphasis in recent scholarship on the formative role of the federal government. Theodore Roosevelt looms large with 69 references, but is beaten into first place by Andrew Jackson with 70. Jackson's fame as the conqueror of the British at New Orleans helped him to the presidency in 1828, when the reign of the gentlemen from the eastern seaboard was rudely ended by this personification of frontier culture. Not all presidents win their own separate entries, not all having figured much in the story of the West. The southerner William Jefferson Clinton is accorded a place (and Hillary too), but California's Richard M. Nixon curiously is not. Another Arkansan to be noticed is the Senate's late expert on foreign affairs, J. William Fulbright, perhaps because he was born in Missouri, though that is not enough to gain entry for Harry S. Truman.

̽»¨ÊÓƵ

In works of this sort such anomalies are virtually unavoidable. More intriguing is the coverage given to professional historians. An entry for a historian, dead or alive, seems to occur every few pages, and in a volume of over 1,300 pages that adds up to a tidy number. Still, historians have contributed to the West too, or at least to the cultural construction of the West, so they should perhaps not be begrudged their moment in the spotlight. Among them is the editor himself, Lamar, who, we are told, has been called "the intellectual father of the new western history", though in that case one wonders why some of the most distinguished practitioners of that history, such as Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick, have been omitted. The essay on Lamar draws attention to his editorship of the volume that "you now hold in your hand", but, reader, be wary - for it weighs in at 6lb 11oz.

Michael Heale is professor of American history, University of Lancaster.

̽»¨ÊÓƵ