Norman E. Tutorow’s annotated bibliography of the Mexican-American War will be useful, if not indispensable, to future writers on the subject, and those who have worked in the area previously will be envious that the bibliography was unavailable to them.
The bibliography contains 4,537 items arranged under eight headings: Reference Works; Manuscript Collections; Government Documents; United States National Archives; Periodical Literature; Books; Theses and Dissertations; and Cartography and Graphics.
There are eight appendixes, some of which contain important information (like appendix six, which includes nine tables on military strength and casualties).
While future work on the Mexican War must of necessity rely heavily upon Tutorow’s bibliography, it is nevertheless somewhat limited in its usefulness for perfectly valid, but regrettable, reasons of space, an apparently insurmountable problem that the compiler acknowledges and explains in his introduction. First, the bibliography contains only material relating specifically to the period of the war itself, from May 1846 to February 1848. Many items treat earlier and later events, but the vast majority do pertain only to this narrowly prescribed chronological period. Second, and perhaps more important, the compiler acknowledges that he “does not deal in any great detail with Mexican sources” (p. xxv). How unfortunate this is, since most work in English on the Mexican War has suffered from ignoring Mexican sources, and the bibliography under review might have stimulated future writers to be more balanced in their treatment of the war and related issues.
The annotations are well done; those treating periodical literature are more complete, for some reason, than those treating books.
