“Scholarship is a product of the specialization.” This maxim is a cornerstone of the modern research university. Professors advise doctoral students to lay claim to a small piece of turf, the smaller the better. A scholarly monograph, senior scholars inform their charges, is a narrow one. Such folk often dismiss encyclopedias, which embrace the contrary principles of brevity and breadth, as of little importance.

They are wrong. A well-crafted encyclopedia is an important tool for advancing knowledge. This point was hammered home two and a half centuries ago when Denis Diderot and his bookish friends in France began work on the first great encyclopedia. Having witnessed a flowering of new ideas in science, mathematics, geography, literature, music, architecture, and many other fields, they perceived a need to transform these independent discoveries into the knowledge revolution. New ideas in one branch of knowledge field had implications for all of the others. Diderot conceived of the encyclopedia form as a means of synthesizing specialized knowledge and presenting it in a form readily accessible to diverse readers.

American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia encompasses another revolution in knowledge. Masculinity studies scarcely existed in the 1970s; it could be discerned, if at all, as a faint echo to the explosion of work on women. But since then, hundreds of scholars in scores of disciplines have been drawn to various specialized aspects of the topic. Issues of masculinity are highlighted at scholarly conferences, and the term pops up in countless book titles and scholarly papers and articles.

This encyclopedia marks an important step in the evolution of masculinity as a field of historical study. It not only tracks recent scholarship in masculinity studies but also, like all encyclopedias, suggests through its organization new ways of looking at the relation among essays. Diderot observed that the alphabetical arrangement of his encyclopedia produced “burlesque contrasts” by, for example, juxtaposing an article on art with another on artisans. Modern scholars might say instead that the inherent randomness of an encyclopedia format provides a means of “deconstructing” customary topics, thereby facilitating a creative rearrangement of the ideas.

So, too, the present volume. Consider the early pages. The article on “Adolescence” features Granville Stanley Hall's 1904 book of that title, which contended that the teenage years, for boys especially, were tumultuous. The next entry is “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a tale of adolescent boys who chafe at social constraints. The essay on “Alcohol” discusses the enduring centrality of drinking rituals among young males, ranging from the colonial tavern to contemporary frat parties. The article on “Alger, Horatio, Jr.,” details how that hack writer's books encouraged generations of boys to transform their adolescent restlessness into a climb from “rags to riches.”

These essays, connected through their alphabetical proximity, outline a familiar rendering of boyhood and give it an interesting depth of detail. The essay on Alger also goes beyond the familiar account to show that this apostle of conventional boyhood was himself what we would now describe as gay. Other essays within the same cluster of pages further complicate the conventional picture of American masculinity. The essay on “Abolitionism” shows that many leaders of the movement embraced a masculine ethos of Christian love, as did the author of antebellum advice books, Timothy Shay Arthur (as described in the article about the writer). An essay on the “American Dream” similarly shows the broad range of genderlinked yearnings. Every reader of this volume will approach it from a different perspective, gleaning a host of interesting facts, but also assembling new insights from the wealth of synthesis.

Encyclopedias do not exist to freeze knowledge within the bound pages of a book, like a bug in amber, but to advance knowledge and push it in new directions. “An Encyclopedia should be begun, carried through, and finished within a certain interval,” Diderot insisted. “Our moment passes and hardly will a great [reference] enterprise be completed before our generation exists no longer.” Bret E. Carroll's encyclopedia synthesizes one generation's rendering of a new body of knowledge. Because of his labors, what will come afterwards will be all the better.