The genre of the historical dictionary has played a major role in contemporary Portuguese historiography. During the later years of the Estado Nôvo, the massive, four-volume Dicionário de História de Portugal (1963-71), edited by Joel Serrão, introduced a whole series of important themes and topics, particularly in contemporary Portuguese history, that had never been directly addressed before.
This new Historical Dictionary, prepared by Douglas Wheeler, the dean of modern Portuguese historiography in North America, makes a signal contribution of a different sort. It provides something that has heretofore been sorely lacking: a brief, lucid, and clearly focused guide in English to the key names, institutions, and themes in Portuguese history, treated reliably and objectively within a compact 288 pages.
The book actually provides even more than that. It begins with an 11-page historical chronology and a 28-page narrative summary of Portuguese history, the dictionary items per se occupying 155 pages. There follows an excellent 100-page, multilingual bibliography of all phases of Portuguese history, very carefully divided by subject, even including such themes as cooking and gardens. This provides the best and most up-to-date general bibliography available outside Portugal and bears as much value as the dictionary itself.
The volume in toto constitutes an excellent compact reference guide to Portuguese history that will prove useful to students and other interested readers, as well as to more specialized researchers. Wheeler has added yet another major contribution to the area of Portuguese studies, which is already indebted to him for so much.
