Sources: The Great American Mosaic: An Exploration of Diversity in Primary Documents

The Great American Mosaic: An Exploration of Diversity in Primary Documents. Edited by Gary Y. Okihiro. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2014. 4 vols. Acid free $415 (ISBN: 978-1-61069-612-8). Ebook (978-1-61069-613-5) available, call for pricing.

Gary Y. Okihiro’s edited collection of primary documents, The Great American Mosaic, is a conventionally formatted ABC-CLIO sourcebook of historical materials divided between four volumes, one of each focusing on the experiences of African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and Native Americans. A set that also included a volume focused on the experience of Muslim Americans might have increased the impression of timeliness to the work as a whole, but such an identity-based assignment would not have gelled with Okihiro’s geographically based organization, the logic of which he explains tautly in a general introduction to the set.

The most unique value of this set comes from its four individual volume editors, each of whom contributes a, introductory essay to their volume along with brief introductions prefacing every primary source document entry, which help provide insight and historical context. Most of the volumes follow a similar chronological organizational scheme and scope. Lionel Bascom’s volume on the African American experience covers from Briton Hammon’s individual narrative of the Revolutionary War era through Barack Obama’s address to reporters in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin case. James Seelye’s American Indian Experience volume begins with Native American creation folk stories and continues through the imperialist bloodshed of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a modern era from 1974 to the present, which he coins “coexistence.” Guadalupe Compean’s volume on the Latino American experience similarly begins with writings of the earliest Spanish colonialists through to sources on such contemporary issues as immigration law, the battle over ethnic studies in academia, and the DREAM Act. The lone exception is Emily Robinson’s volume on the Asian American and Pacific Islander experience, which she navigates by nation of origin to include sections on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans as well as Cambodian, Filipino, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Americans, to name but a few more. Each volume contains a selective bibliography and an extensive keyword index.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a majority of the original primary sources reprinted here tips toward government documents and other materials that fall outside of copyright into the public domain. The question then becomes not one of whether the primary sources contained therein hold value but whether the chosen format of delivery of these sources has begun to outlive its utility. If students are provided basic citation information for many of these primary sources and they are readily discoverable on the web at the Government Publishing Office, the National Archives, or a variety of university open-access digitization projects, then that is where the Google generation is most likely to encounter them first. This may also help explain why more directly comparable multivolume works like Lehman’s Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America (Gale, 1999) are more than ten years old while more recently published comparable works—Bean’s Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader (University Press of Kentucky, 2009) or Baylor’s The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America (Columbia University Press, 2004)—are more concentrated single volumes that emphasize original commentary supplemented by a more targeted range of primary source material. Consequently, its scope makes The Great American Mosaic best suited for smaller or general collections.—Chris G. Hudson, Associate Director for Collection Services, Olin and Chalmers Library, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio