Susan Lee Johnson is an American historian.

In 1978 Johnson received a B.A. in history from Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and in 1984 an M.A. at Arizona State University, and in 1993 a Ph.D. from Yale University. Johnson currently holds the Harry Reid Endowed Chair for the History of the Intermountain West at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas,^[1] and is an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI.^[2][3]

• 2001 Bancroft Prize

• Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-4696-5883-4 ^[4]
• Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W. W. Norton. 2000. ISBN 978-0-393-32099-2.
• The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), co-edited with Estelle Freedman, Barbara Gelpi, and Kath Weston. ISBN 978-0-226-26151-5
• “Writing Kit Carson in the Cold War: ‘The Family,’ ‘The West,’ and Their Chroniclers,” in On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American Southwest, ed. David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 278-318.
• “Nail This to Your Door: A Disputation on the Power, Efficacy, and Indulgent Delusion of Western Scholarship that Neglects the Challenge of Gender and Women’s History,” Pacific Historical Review 79, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 605–17.
• “The Last Fandango: Women, Work, and the End of the California Gold Rush,” in Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World, ed. Kenneth N. Owens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 230–63.
• Kevin Starr; Richard Orsi, eds. (2000). "'My own private life': Toward a History of Desire in Gold Rush California". Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-22496-4.
• “‘A memory sweet to soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in the History of the ‘American West,’” Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1993). Reprinted in:
  • Clyde Milner ed. (1996) A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-510048-8
  • Mary Ann Irwin; James Brooks, eds. (2004). Women and Gender in the American West: Jensen-Miller Prize Essays from the Coalition for Western Women's History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0-8263-3599-9.
• "The United States of Jessie Benton Fremont: Corresponding with the Nation", Reviews in American History, Volume 23, Number 2, June 1995
• Vicki Ruíz; Ellen Carol DuBois, eds. (2000). ""Domestic" Live in the Diggings: The Southern Mines in the California Gold Rush". Unequal sisters: a multicultural reader in U.S. women's history. Routledge. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-415-92516-7. Susan Lee Johnson.