In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990

... to tell your truth. This epochal work illustrates the gap between reality and the historical cliches acccepted by most people in these United States, as enshrined for example in San Antonio's Alamo. It de-demonizes the Mexicans (whose laws banned slavery) and their President Santa-Anna (who had every right to try to get rid of "illegal immigrants"--isn't that an irony now that the shoe is on the other foot!) while shedding a corrective light on the Anglo-Texans' goals (exercize their "freedom" to occupy a foreign territory to then illegally introduce therein an otherwise banned "peculiar" practice). More importantly, Professor Taylor documents in this book, in exemplary and objective fashion, the complex fate of an American minority and its long-standing efforts to regain, at long last, its constitutionally recognized unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

What is initially strking about this masterful endeavor is its scope--from its chronological detail to its rich geographic attention to the broader West. An engaging scholarly work that certainly qualifies within the the realm of required reading for any curriculum in U.S. History or African American studies. It is refreshing to find a more recently compiled history of the black experience, one that focuses on the broad range of African American social evolution throughout the American West. I was particularly interested in his narrative on the cultural assimilation of blacks into Native American society. Highly impressive in its bibliographic scope, this work rates as a definitive contribution to more current historiographic material.

Taylor's book represents a monumental achievement. This is a tremendous book that covers the history of Blacks in the West more completely and with greater detail than any previous work. It easily supplants William Katz's "The Black West" and W. Sherman Savage's "Blacks in the West" as the definitive work in the field. This book should be required reading for every student in American history.