Johnson, Marilynn S. 1957–

PERSONAL: Born June 25, 1957, in NY; daughter of Thomas C. and Mary Johnson; married Daniel Zedek (a newspaper designer), 1990; children: Rosa, Jacob. Education: Stanford University, B.A., 1979; New York University, M.A., 1984, Ph.D., 1990.

ADDRESSES: Home—Brookline, MA. Office—Department of History, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167; fax: 617-552-1882. E-mail—johnsohi@bc.edu.

CAREER: Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, assistant professor, 1990–94; Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, assistant professor of history, 1995–97, associate professor, 1997–2005, professor, 2005–, chair, history department, 2006–. Pacific Historical Review, board of editors, 1993–96; Boston Area Seminar in Urban and Immigration History, cochair and cofounder, 1998–2006.

MEMBER: American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Urban History Association, Social Science History Association, American Council of Learned Societies (fellow), Massachusetts Historical Society (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS: Bayard Still Dissertation Prize, New York University, 1990–91; W. Turrentine Jackson Award, American Historical Association (Pacific Coast Branch), 1990–91; Louis Knott Koontz Prize, American Historical Association (Pacific Coast Branch), 1992; Dean's Service Award and Chaplain's Service Award, Southern Methodist University, 1993; Sierra Prize, Western Association of Women Historians, 1994, for The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II.

WRITINGS:

The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1993.

(Coauthor, with James A. Henretta, David Brody, and Susan Ware) America's History, 4th edition, Volume 2, Bedford/St. Martin's (New York, NY), 2000.

Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 2004.

Violence in the American West: The Mining and Range Wars, Bedford Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of book reviews and articles to professional journals and periodicals; contributor of chapters to books, including Labor in the Era of World War II, edited by Sally Miller and Daniel Cornford, Greenwood Press (New York, NY), 1995; Working People of California: Toward a New Social History of the Golden State, edited by Daniel Cornford, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1995; Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture, edited by Heather Fryer, McCullen Museum of Art, Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA), 2002; A Day in the Life: Studying Daily Life through History, edited by Peter Stearns, Greenwood Press (New York, NY), 2005; and Uniform Behavior, edited by Andrea McCardle and Stacey McGoldrick, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS: A professor of history, Marilynn S. Johnson is a specialist in modern U.S. urban and social history and the American West. She is the author of several well-received works on American history, including The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II, which chronicles an important time in California and United States history and was the recipient of the Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. In Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City, Johnson focuses on a historical aspect of another American city. This study of police abuse begins with the founding of the New York Police Department in 1845, and takes the reader on a survey up to the scandal of the mistreatment of Abner Louima in the late 1990s. A reviewer for City Limits noted that Johnson shows that such acts of abuse were "rarely random acts … from out-of-control officers," but rather symptoms of a larger systemic problem. Johnson also provides interesting details, such as the derivation of the term "third degree" from the initiation rites of the Freemasons. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found Street Justice to be a "fascinating, highly detailed historical survey." More praise came from Library Journal contributor Tim Delaney, who felt the same work was "well-written," and that Johnson "carefully documents the various anti-brutality movements."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, June, 1995, Albert S. Broussard, review of The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II, p. 966.

Choice, July-August, 1994, D.F. Anderson, review of The Second Gold Rush, p. 1784; June, 2004, T.D. Beal, review of Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York, p. 1946.

City Limits, February, 2004, review of Street Justice, p. 33.

Historian, winter, 1997, review of The Second Gold Rush, p. 405.

Journal of American History, March, 1995, Roger Lotchin, review of The Second Gold Rush, p. 1810.

Journal of Economic Literature, September, 1994, review of The Second Gold Rush, p. 1350.

Labor History, winter, 1995, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, review of The Second Gold Rush, p. 129.

Library Journal, November 1, 2003, Tim Delaney, review of Street Justice, p. 109.

Pacific Historical Review, May, 1995, Charles Wollenberg, review of The Second Gold Rush, p. 313.

Publishers Weekly, October 27, 2003, review of Street Justice, p. 56.

Western Historical Quarterly, winter, 1994, Delores Nason McBroome, review of The Second Gold Rush, p. 514.

ONLINE

Boston College Department of History Web site, http://www.bc.edu/ (November 20, 2006), "Marilynn S. Johnson: Professor and Chair of the Department."

Boston College Web site, http://www2.bc.edu/ (November 20, 2006), "Marilynn S. Johnson."