Book Review

The first thing that should be said about this anthology is that its editors have performed an invaluable service for scholars of American history. We have long needed a single volume that pulls together the research on African Americans in California. The editors were careful to include new and previously unpublished work that vastly complicates our picture of what has been a romantic and undertheorized subfield, "blacks in the West." Lawrence B. de Graaf and Quintard Taylor provide a lengthy introduction that lays the groundwork for those unfamiliar with the terrain, both physical and scholarly. The remaining articles are divided chronologically into four sections: "Forming the Community," "Pursuing the Dream," "Developments in Culture and Politics," and "The Dream Deferred." The first section opens with a seminal and definitive contribution by Jack D. Forbes, "The Early African Heritage of California." Forbes's pathbreaking research reminds us that the experiences of people of African descent before 1848 must be understood quite differently from those of the era of statehood, as "Spain and Mexico tended to accommodate, absorb, and sometimes erase Africanness." This provocative assessment is supported with telling details about interracial families in early California history. Willi Coleman's "African American Women and Community Development in California, 1848–1900," is a timely assessment of some of the research on women in this era and areas in need of future research. As a whole, however, this is an uneven section that fails to address the theme of community formation.

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