I will admit to not having a great deal of knowledge on the period in question and the western United States so I would like to become better informed. As silly as it sounds, after watching the HBO show Deadwood I thought it would be worthwhile to read up on mining towns and the social impact of westward expansion. Are there any particular authors that I must read? For other periods and regions that I read about it is usually the social histories that get my attention because they are often interdisciplinary in their impact. I hope I can get some great recommendations! I should also say that I am looking for academic books, not popular reading- and I say that because half the books specifically on deadwood that I have found are written by fiction writers or those without serious pedigree.
Topics of interest:
Gold Rush, Frontier Towns and governance, Rural agricultural production, Native American-white relations
Thanks everyone!
I recommend anything by the late J.S. Holliday, his "The World Rushed in" being a classic portrait of the California Gold Rush from a social history point of view. I also recommend Ralph Mann's After the Gold Rush. Elliott West has an excellent book on childhood and on saloons in the West (and anything he writes is solid). On saloons I also recommend Kelly Dixon's Boomtown Saloons(2005).
If you don't mind my advancing my own books, my recent compilation of Gold Rush letters (2012) can give you insight into everyday life of the Gold Rush miners. And my book The Roar and the Silence: A History of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode (1998) is a social/cultural history of one of the more important mining districts of the West. Something of a sequel - reassessing the district, but in particular considering it from the point of view of architecture, landscape, and especially archaeology - appeared in 2012: "Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past. I hope that helps.