Education

PhD, New York University, 1990

Fields of Interest

Modern U.S. urban and social history; the American West

Academic Profile

Professor Johnson's work focuses on urban social relations in late nineteenth-and twentieth-century America. She teaches courses on social movements, urban and working-class history, violence, and the American West. Her earlier work looked at internal migration during World War II, policing brutality, and violence on the mining and cattle frontiers.  She is currently completing a new book, Boston's New Immigrants, about the history of new immigrants in greater Boston since the 1960s.

Representative Publications

• "The Career Girl Murders: Gender, Race and Crime in 1960s New York," Women Studies Quarterly (2012).
• Violence in the West: The Johnson County Range War and Ludlow Massacre: A Brief History with Documents (2008)
• Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York (2003)
• "Enduring Myths, Changing Realities," in Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture (2002)
• American's History (4th edition, 1999)
• "Gender, Race and Rumors: Reexamining the 1943 Race Riots," in Gender and History (1998)
• "Mobilizing the Homefront: Labor and Politics in Oakland, California, 1943-1951" in Working People of California: Towards a New Social History of the Golden State (1995)
• "Wartime Shipyards: The Transformation of Labor in San Francisco's East Bay" in American Labor in the Era of World War II (1995)
• The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (1993)