Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush

Well researched and written but pretty dry. I skimmed sections that were not of interest to me.

I like Johnson's approach to social history, particularly contextualizing events in terms of gender and race understanding of the time. It's also interesting to read such a fine, detailed summary of things gleaned through many hours of work reading through diaries, court records, newspapers, etc.

I came to this book hoping for more info on LGBT history for the Gold Rush. Sadly it's not really in the record. Not for lack of trying, I appreciate the few scraps of homosexual history the author could find. I also appreciated when she just said outright that there was only one unambiguous record of homosexuality in her study area, a mention of buggery in a divorce court. But a few stories of mining men and their close relationships with other men, ones that it's easy to imagine were romantic. She also does a good job explaining why the Anglo sources she mostly draws from would not have recorded more explicit evidence of homosexual behavior, even very private ones like diaries.

I came away with a better understanding of that brief window in the early 1850s in the Southern Diggings, and a deep appreciation of the multicultural nuances at work.