Maintaining the same high standards of the first edition, published in 1973, this new, revised edition is still the most comprehensive one-volume history of a state that was once thought of as "a bridge to somewhere else." In revising, Elliott summarizes the state's economic, political, and social history since 1973 and strengthens a major point he made then: that Nevada's acceptance of liberal marriage and divorce laws and of legalized gambling brought economic stability to a state singularly devoid of stable economic resources. -- from Book Jacket
Chronicles the history of the American West in the twentieth century, tracing economical, political, social, and cultural developments in the region from the turn of the century to the 1980s
This important book is a detailed reinterpretation of one of the most explosive events in modern American politics - Franklin Roosevelt's controversial attempt in 1937 to "pack" the Supreme Court by adding justices who supported his New Deal policies. McKenna traces in unprecedented detail theorigins of FDR's plan, its secret history, and the President's final failure. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources McKenna provides the definitive account of a turning point in American political and legal history.
Las Vegas—the name evokes images of divorce and dice, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history. Now this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant “sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.
Institution. Remarkably detailed and entertaining, Suburban Xanadu tells us a great deal about popular leisure in America, and why the suburban ideal has become so dominant in our social life. Book jacket.
Demonstrates that contemporary forms of opposition to the environmental movement and environmental protection have a common, traceable ancestry in resistance against federal resource policies in the West. Identifies the changing role of the federal government in its natural resource policies, looking at rivalries between different agencies. Analyzes environmental opposition from a political perspective to explain how it fits into a larger political process, examining tactics used by business and grassroots groups in the environmental opposition and groups' linkages to philosophical and ideological agendas such as the modern conservative and libertarian movements. For activists and scholars. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Digging mineral wealth from the ground dates to prehistoric times, and Europeans pursued mining in the Americas from the earliest colonial days. Prior to the Civil War, little mining was deep enough to require maps. However, the major finds of the mid-nineteenth century, such as the Comstock Lode, were vastly larger than any before in America. In Seeing Underground, Nystrom argues that, as industrial mining came of age in the United States, the development of maps and models gave power to a new visual culture and allowed mining engineers to advance their profession, gaining authority over mining operations from the miners themselves. Starting in the late nineteenth century, mining engineers developed a new set of practices, artifacts, and discourses to visualize complex, pitch-dark three-dimensional spaces. These maps and models became necessary tools in creating and controlling those spaces. They made mining more understandable, predictable, and profitable. Nystrom shows that this new visual culture was crucial to specific developments in American mining, such as implementing new safety regulations after the Avondale, Pennsylvania fire of 1869 killed 110 men and boys; understanding complex geology, as in the rich ores of Butte, Montana; and settling high-stakes litigation, such as the Tonopah, Nevada, Jim Butler v. West End lawsuit, which reached the US Supreme Court. Nystrom demonstrates that these neglected artifacts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have much to teach us today. The development of a visual culture helped create a new professional class of mining engineers and changed how mining was done. Seeing Undergound is the winner of the 2015 Mining History Association’s Clark Spence Award for the best book on mining history.
In 1950 Las Vegas saw a million tourists. In 1960 it attracted ten million. The city entered the fifties as a regional destination where prosperous postwar Americans could enjoy vices largely forbidden elsewhere, and it emerged in the sixties as a national hotspot, the glitzy resort city that lights up the American West today. Becoming America’s Playground chronicles the vice and the toil that gave Las Vegas its worldwide reputation in those transformative years. Las Vegas’s rise was no happy accident. After World War II, vacationing Americans traveled the country in record numbers, making tourism a top industry in such states as California and Florida. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce saw its chance and developed a plan to capitalize on the town’s burgeoning reputation for leisure. Las Vegas pinned its hopes for the future on Americans’ need for escape. Transforming a vice city financed largely by the mob into a family vacation spot was not easy. Hotel and casino publicists closely monitored media representations of the city and took every opportunity to stage images of good, clean fun for the public—posing even the atomic bomb tests conducted just miles away as an attraction. The racism and sexism common in the rest of the nation in the era prevailed in Las Vegas too. The wild success of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack performances at the Sands Hotel in 1960 demonstrated the city’s slow progress toward equality. Women couldn’t work as dealers in Las Vegas until the 1970s, yet they found more opportunities for well-paying jobs there than many American women could find elsewhere. Gragg shows how a place like the Las Vegas Strip—with its glitz and vast wealth and its wildly public consumption of vice—rose to prominence in the 1950s, a decade of Cold War anxiety and civil rights conflict. Becoming America’s Playground brings this pivotal decade in Las Vegas into sharp focus for the first time.