Writing Kit Carson

“For readers who wish to know more about how history is written, its influencers, their writings, and how figures such as Carson fall from grace. An excellent addition for women’s studies collections.”—Library Journal

“In this sometimes ruminative, sometimes gripping volume, Johnson shows how women’s history does not simply add to, but transforms our broader understanding of history. . . . [Writing Kit Carson is] a novel work of scholarship and lyrical narrative, enriched and enlivened with memoir, loaded with impressive research, careful citation, historiography, and bibliography.”—Reviews in American History

“A capacious and unruly book. It sweeps across more than a century. As it spins its yarn across lives and decades, it moves backward and forward in time. In glorious prose it defies the borders between author and subject, between past and present, and lures the reader into caring about the tangled lives of two women . . . staking their own claim to significance, in part, by their work on Kit Carson. . . . Richly complex.”—Missouri Historical Review

“A remarkably thoughtful, subtle, genre-bending study that weaves history and historiography, politics, and memoir into an eloquent whole.”—Emma Donoghue, author of Room and The Pull of the Stars

“It is a testimony to Johnson’s talents as a historian and a writer that this book is such a page-turner. Here we have the story of two unknown women, drawn to each other in the 1950s by their shared fascination with Kit Carson, a hero in their heyday, but certainly not in ours. Focused on their overtly unremarkable lives, Writing Kit Carson is a unique history of twentieth-century America, rooted in lived experience. Johnson’s archival indefatigability, expert toggling between small and big stories, and her stance—at once empathic and critical—makes this a remarkable history.”—Alice Echols, author of Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking

“Susan Johnson has crafted a stunning meditation on the ways in which we all struggle to make sense of the contingencies and compromises that shape the making and consumption of history.” — Katrina Jagodinsky, author of Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands 1854-1946

“A reflexive — and revelatory — queer historiography about how, why, where, and when two nonacademic women historians wrote about Kit Carson. Johnson simultaneously examines how, where, when, and why she herself writes about all three, and demonstrates how gender, race, class, intimacy, aspiration, identity, and grief inform stories about Carson, and more broadly, how these factors shape the lives and work of those who write western history. Writing Kit Carson challenges gender theorists, historians, and others to consider how they themselves may 'traffic in men.'” — Sylvia Rodríguez, author of Acequia: Water Sharing, Sanctity, and Place

“This is a work of daunting originality, one that only a skilled and experienced historian could attempt. Susan Johnson tells her tale with imagination, daring, and grace.”—Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896