The study of daily life is a fairly new type of history. Readers can find plenty of books on high politics and diplomacy but the history of the kitchen has not been written about much. Yet it can tell us a lot: it reveals changing patterns of consumption, the availability of servants, nutritional levels, domestic technology. My own copy of the Montgomery Ward catalogue for 1895 contains a lot of raw social history: feminists have argued that women's underwear tells us a something about women's roles; “smokers' requisites” points to a common if not quite universal habit one hundred years ago; and the best‐sellers list is a clear indicator of popular taste. The same can be said about the study of the schoolroom, bedroom, church, sports field, library, factory and farm – all places about which this book has a lot to say. Greenwood should be congratulated, then, on choosing “Daily Life” both as the theme for a series of encyclopaedias beginning with The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life (Salisbury, 2004) (RR 2005/170) and continuing with this set. But I have misgivings about how the idea for these volumes has been executed.
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life in America is a very ambitious book. It examines almost every aspect of American life and it does so for every period of its history. It takes us from the Amish to the Zoetrope in the early period and from Antibiotics to Zoning in modern times. Here are just a few items taken at random: going courting in colonial times, growing indigo, keeping pets during the civil war (!), electric light bulbs, the very first Coca‐Cola (mixed in 1886), the influenza epidemic of 1918, major league baseball in the 1920s, being sick in the 1960s, eating hot dogs today. What makes the authors' task still bigger is that the USA is a continent, not just a country. It is awfully difficult to generalize across disparate zones like Florida, Montana and New York City. And the editors' aims do not stop there: each volume has a selection of primary documents which together form 10 per cent of the book.
In my view the basic concept of this book is problematic. With any undertaking that tries to survey social, economic and intellectual affairs along with recreation and religion, the authors have their work cut out. On top of that some of the entries and documents deal with politics and war. This makes the ambit of the book almost impossibly large – to put it bluntly, the editors may have bitten off more than they can chew. But enough said: let us accept The Encyclopedia of Daily Life in America for what it is.
The old type of encyclopaedia was a strictly alphabetical sequence of short, factual articles, suitably cross‐referenced. Readers could simply “look something up”. This book is different in a number of respects. First, the articles give us a review and a discussion of each topic as well as offering us a body of fact. Indeed, factual detail is not their primary focus. Second, the alphabetical arrangement is “out”; in place of that the material is arranged into historical periods. This means that the old‐style reader who wants to “look something up” is thrown back onto the index. This sort of reference tool in printed form lives and dies by its index. However, this arrangement of materials has an advantage. It means that you can approach the work through a period or through a theme, as desired. The first approach gives you a rounded account of any one historical age; the second approach gives you a connected account of any one theme throughout the entire life of the republic, e.g. intellectual life from colonial days to the present. But is that what we want from an encyclopaedia?
Now for some concrete details: the Encyclopedia comes in four large quarto volumes, each dealing with a period of US history. It starts in 1763 and terminates at the present day with break points at 1861, 1900 and 1940. Volumes one to three are of equal size, around 650 pages; volume four is more manageable (and liftable!) at 470 pages. They are well bound and printed and the covers have glossy, laminated illustrations on both sides – a growing trend. The pages are sewn. Apart from the general editor, each volume had an editor of its own. Volumes 1, 2 and 4 follow an identical pattern: each one is divided into periods and, within each period, there are themes like Domestic Life, Recreational Life, Religious Life and so on; each of these periods is introduced by an Overview of about forty pages and ends with a short bibliography. Volume 3 is different: the time span (1900 to 1940) is left whole and the author then divides the USA into six regions. These regions get the same treatment as before: Domestic Life … etc. This rather monotonous approach does work, after a fashion. Each volume ends with a further reading list, citing online resources as well as books.
The Encyclopedia has illustrations scattered throughout. Many of them are genuinely interesting, like a Second World War picture of women workers in gas masks cleaning out blast furnaces; or, again, a political cartoon of 1870 showing the Democrats as a coalition of careerist politicians, Irish immigrants and ex‐confederates. But some of the pictures are frankly pointless. Do we really need a shot of an American bison or yet another portrait of Jackie Kennedy? At the end of each volume is the same, cumulative index to the entire set. It runs to 40 pages. I feel it could have been longer and more detailed for a 2,400‐page book. For example, there is no way into “crime” or “prisons” or “punishment” through the index.
This set has a curious feature. We know the editors' names and the last page of volume 4 gives us a list of contributors and editorial assistants; but in many cases, we have no clue as to who wrote what; nor are we told who the authors are: professors, journalists, independent scholars? It would have been nice to know. The general editor, Randall Miller, throws some light on the authorship by stating, in an introductory note, that the “editors” of volumes 3 and 4 wrote a good deal of the content themselves.
To be honest, I found this a slightly frustrating book to use. It is difficult to use it simply as a mine of factual information because of the way in which it is written and organized. The problem is at its most acute when you wish to track down a specific person, movement or event. But unlike a quick‐reference guide, this is a book that you can sit down and read. It scores high marks for that. It is a “readers' encyclopedia” and perhaps that is what it should be called. So who would use it? Students preparing a paper who want an easy way into the subject; teachers “getting up” a period who have very little time before lessons; general readers wishing to trace the history of a special interest like sports or food or transport, (although, presumably they would secure a good specialist book and read it). The true specialist would find it far too sketchy.
One other qualm: I do not feel the Encyclopedia would have suffered if the documents had been taken out. Given the vast scope of the book, they are perfunctory at best. The coverage is hit‐and‐miss and they are readily available elsewhere, so it is hard to see what purpose they serve. Without them these oversized volumes could have been made a bit slimmer. Two cheers for this book, not three.
