| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000. Ed. by Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. x, 390 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8061-3524-7.)
In the summer of 1992 historians gathered in Logan, Utah, to debate the significance of the American West in understanding American history. Many parsed this question by asking a more fundamental question: how should historians conceptualize the American West? They wondered whether we should speak of many wests, conference shorthand for the argument of a socially constructed West, a fluid place constituted through power relations. Quintard Taylor, a participant in the conference, declared that, if historians are to grapple fully with these power relations, they must ask whether the West was "significantly different for African Americans" (Clyde A. Milner II, ed., A New Significance, 1996, p. 290). Taylor answered that, while research on blacks in the West is sparse, he believed that African Americans experienced an ambiguous West: blacks both succeeded in gaining some rights and found their quest for rights blocked by racism. Taylor's answer, which complicates the history of the West and its significance for national history, was also a call for more research.	1
In this anthology, Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, the editors, present eighteen essays on the history of African American women in the West; all but one of the essays are new. Additionally, relevant and illuminating primary documents are woven into the book. The collection emphasizes how black women confronted myriad wests, from the seventeenth-century frontier of New Spain to Oakland of the 1960s; in other words, the agency of black women in a variety of different—yet always western—circumstances is the theme of the book.	. . .

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