Review

General Books

Historical Dictionary of the 1970s, edited by James S. Olson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. 416 pages. $89.50, cloth.

These two books are excellent reference tools. Each contains hundreds of references to famous individuals and events in politics, economics, military affairs, diplomacy, religion, society, and culture. James Olson is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including a similar dictionary on the 1920s and the Vietnam War. He also co-authored a textbook on the Vietnam War with his frequent collaborator, Randy Roberts. One caveat must precede the rest of the review. The books focus on American history in each decade. A more accurate title for the books would be, Historical Dictionary of America in the 1960s/197s2. The choice of emphasis is not criticized, just the insufficiently descriptive title for each book.	1
The 1960s book is over 150 pages longer than the 1970s, either reflecting the greater historical action of the earlier decade, or Olson's view of the number of historical events in each decade. The book on the 60s runs the gamut from Altamont to Dr. Zhivago, Frank Church to Nguyen Van Thieu, and Freedom Rides to Bobby Seale. Entries vary in length from a sentence to several pages. The longest sections belong to the Antiwar Movement (6 pages) and the Civil Rights Movement (5 pages). The authors always list one or more major books on each topic as sources, and add a selective bibliography at the end of the volume to further guide researchers. The interpretations embedded in each entry are not radical on the left or right; they hew closely to interpretations found in college history textbooks. The subject with the most entries in the 60s volume is the Vietnam War. This proportion of entries on the Vietnam War falls off dramatically in the 70s volume--as it should. More important than proportion of entries is the lack of an explanation of the criteria used to choose the entries. While Olson seems to have fulfilled his desire to "take an encyclopedic look" at the 60s (and 70s), one wonders why some political and diplomatic subjects received much more attention than others. Also, what criteria were used to select the cultural entries?	2
The range of entries for the 1960s was noted and the same range of entries is found in the 70s volume. Abba to Rod Stewart, Boat People to Pol Pot, George McGovern to Nelson Rockefeller, Equal Rights Amendment to Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Kojak to Wonder Woman--all make their way into this montage of characters and events. Sometimes the very breadth and juxtaposition of dissimilar entries is jarring--and amusing. Kissinger following Kiss (702 volume, p. 220), Pet Rock before Pham Van Dong (70s volume, p. 351), are just a few examples of this phenomenon. This raises the larger question, however, of organization. Would such historical dictionaries be more useful if entries were organized alphabetically within broad subject areas (politics, diplomacy, culture, and so on)? As it stands, there is helpful cross-referencing within the text and in the index, but if a student sought information on hard rock bands of the 1970s but did not know a single band name, the student would have to do some searching to find Grand Funk Railroad (p. 175) and Led Zeppelin (p. 230). There are two more concerns. The first is the selection of authors for the entries. In the 60s volume, for instance, there are 23 undergraduate contributors, 4 graduate student contributors, 10 professors (excluding Olson), and 5 "professional" contributors. While I am sure that an undergraduate can write as thorough an entry on Andy Warhol (p. 472-73) as an accomplished scholar, I question the use of undergraduates to write entries, when other historical reference works use only established scholars as authors.	3
The second concern involves overlap. In both volumes, for example, one finds entries on William Brennan, Muhammad Ali, Jim Morrison, and My Three Sons, among many others. While such overlap is historically understandable, couldn't the press have saved money by simply publishing one entry in one volume, then referring readers of other volumes to that volume? After all, Greenwood Press is producing a virtual series of these books. On the positive side, each of these books contains a chronology of the decade, an index, and a brief description of the contributors.	4
Roanoke College   John G. Selby

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