Roaring Camp

Johnson (history, U. of Colorado) explores the dynamic social world created by the gold rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Stockton. In order to chart the ways in which the conventions of identity were reshaped in the diggings, she explores how gender was no longer mapped predictably onto bodies understood as male and female, but according to racial and cultural markers of difference heedless of bodily configurations. In describing the all-male households of the diggings, the mines where the men worked, the fandango houses where they played, and how the gold found its way out of the hands of men to women, she gives a picture of how this peculiar world evolved over time, and how a cultural memory of the gold rush took root. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)