Roaring Camp
The Social World of the California Gold Rush
14 March 2001
Description
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
The world of the California Gold Rush that comes down to us through fiction and film is one of half-truths. In this brilliant work of social history, Susan Lee Johnson enters the well-worked diggings of Gold Rush history and strikes a rich lode.
Johnson explores the dynamic social world created by the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Stockton, charting the surprising ways in which the conventions of identity—ethnic, national, and sexual—were reshaped. With a keen eye for character and story, she shows us how this peculiar world evolved over time, and how our cultural memory of the Gold Rush took root.
Reviews
"Johnson puts forward a perspective on the Gold Rush far different from many stories and legends of yore…A provocative, eye-opening book." — Sacremento Bee
"Roaring Camp deepens our understanding of continental conquest. Beautifully researched, vividly written, and compassionately argued, it also reveals the Gold Rush as a fascinating theater of human behavior." — Times Literary Supplement
"Meticulously researched, precise, and lively…Roaring Camp offers a compelling portrait of the ways in which the experience of life in the diggings profoundly affected and altered American ideas about manhood and society." — The American Scholar
"A must-read…Briskly, vividly written, acute in observation and use of anecdote." — Choice
"An exemplary work of imaginative, innovative, and sensitive historical scholarship…Beautifully, even lyrically written, it opens many new insights in western U.S. history." — David G. Gutierrez, University of California, San Diego
Awards
Winner — Bancroft Prize, 2001
