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OAH Distinguished Lectureship program 40 years 1981-2021

OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile

OAH Distinguished Lectureship program 40 years 1981-2021

Susan Lee Johnson

Portrait of Susan Lee Johnson
Image Credit: Robert John Kley

Susan Lee Johnson holds the inaugural Harry Reid Endowed Chair for the History of the Intermountain West at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is President-Elect of the Western History Association. Johnson is the author of Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West and Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. A historian of western North America, Johnson studies the history of gender, desire, and embodiment, and of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. Johnson’s current project explores how the nineteenth-century Santa Fe Trail connected two worlds of slavery—Black chattel slavery in Missouri and points east and Indigenous captivity and coerced labor in New Mexico and the borderlands.



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Featured Lecture

Bury My Hero at Wounded Knee: Gender, Race, and Historical Practice in the Long 1970s

This lecture examines the fall from grace of western "heroes" like Kit Carson. Focusing on the 1970s, it chronicles efforts initiated by Latinx and Indigenous activists in Colorado and New Mexico to dethrone Carson. It also explores the pushback of Carson enthusiasts--both women and men, both professional and non-professional historians. It analyzes the transformative impact of progressive social movements on the study of western history.

OAH Lectures

This lecture explores how the Santa Fe Trail connected two worlds of slavery--Black chattel slavery in Missouri and points east, and Indigenous captivity and coerced labor in New Mexico and the borderlands. It focuses on the U.S.-Mexico War era, when increased travel on the trail left a long paper trail. It examines the quotidian experiences of captive and enslaved people, who were Indigenous, African American, and ethnic Mexican.
This lecture examines how and why the field of western history professionalized relatively late. The Western History Association wasn't founded until 1962. It was preceded by a group called The Westerners, founded in the 1940s by nonprofessional historians, mostly white men. So in the Cold War era when film and TV westerns proliferated in popular culture, it was amateur rather academic historians who advanced the study of the West. The 1960s saw a contest between amateurs and academics that had lasting consequences for the field, especially for those committed to the study of non-white, non-male westerners.
This lecture examines the fall from grace of western "heroes" like Kit Carson. Focusing on the 1970s, it chronicles efforts initiated by Latinx and Indigenous activists in Colorado and New Mexico to dethrone Carson. It also explores the pushback of Carson enthusiasts--both women and men, both professional and non-professional historians. It analyzes the transformative impact of progressive social movements on the study of western history.

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