West Las Vegas

West Las Vegas

Author: Patricia Hershwitzky

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738581965

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Original Las Vegas faced stiff odds with fluctuating fortunes throughout the 20th century. Celebrated as the McWilliams Townsite in 1904, Las Vegas's first commercial enterprise was quickly crushed by savvy developers owning most of the water rights on the southeast side of the railroad tracks. Deprived of resources and services, the tent-riddled ground soon earned the name Ragtown and was populated by the area's poorest, the majority being minorities. During the 1940s and 1950s, a soaring influx of blacks from small plantation towns in the South descended upon Las Vegas, seeking a promised land during the boom of wartime industry, but Jim Crow laws flew in with them. Ironically, segregation led to the emergence of the Westside as an enclave of successful businesses, services, entertainment and casino venues, dozens of churches, and middle-class housing. Although integration brought an exodus and decline, a bold new generation of West Las Vegans is once again revitalizing the original Westside community.


Wildest of the Wild West

Wildest of the Wild West

Author: Howard Bryan

Publisher: Clear Light Pub

Published: 1991-07-01

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 9780940666139

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The 'Wild West' stories of Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone pale in comparison to the incredible story of Las Vegas, New Mexico, for decades considered the most violent community on America's western frontier. In Wildest of the Wild West, popular Western historian Howard Bryan provides a spirited account of the violent, melodramatic, and often bizarre events that centred in and around this small Hispanic farm and ranching community from 1835 to 1915.


Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Author: Hunter S. Thompson

Publisher: Turtleback Books

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781417665884

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Records the experiences of a free-lance writer who embarked on a zany journey into the drug culture.


The Strip

The Strip

Author: Stefan Al

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-03-03

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 026203574X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The transformations of the Strip—from the fake Wild West to neon signs twenty stories high to “starchitecture”—and how they mirror America itself. The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015—ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the “implosion capital of the world” as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new—offering a non-metaphorical definition of “creative destruction.” In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change. Al tells two parallel stories. He describes the feverish competition of Las Vegas developers to build the snazziest, most tourist-grabbing casinos and resorts—with a cast of characters including the mobster Bugsy Siegel, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and the would-be political kingmaker Sheldon Adelson. And he views the Strip in a larger social context, showing that it has not only reflected trends but also magnified them and sometimes even initiated them. Generously illustrated with stunning color images throughout, The Strip traces the many metamorphoses of a city that offers a vivid projection of the American dream.


Witch

Witch

Author: Glenn Puit

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2005-12-06

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780425207192

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Drawing on extensive interviews with the accused herself, here is the sordid, twisted, and surprising story of Brookey Lee West—a successful technical writer from Silicon Valley who became Las Vegas’ most notorious female serial killer. In February, 2001, police uncovered the decomposed remains of Christine Smith bagged like garbage in a Las Vegas storage unit. She’d been dead for years. Next to the makeshift tomb were books on witchcraft and Satanism. It didn’t take long for authorities to discover that the owner of the foul Canyon Gate Unit #317 was Christine’s own daughter, Brookey Lee West. Further investigation revealed something even more shocking—a one-woman crime spree that spanned two decades, stretched from Nevada to California, and may have counted among its victims Brookey’s own husband and brother....


Unreal City

Unreal City

Author: Judith Nies

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2014-04-08

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1568587481

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An epic struggle over land, water, and power is erupting in the American West and the halls of Washington, DC. It began when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas. Journalist and historian Judith Nies has been tracking this story for nearly four decades. She follows the money and tells us the true story of wealth and water, mendacity, and corruption at the highest levels of business and government. Amid the backdrop of the breathtaking desert landscape, Unreal City shows five cultures colliding—Hopi, Navajo, global energy corporations, Mormons, and US government agencies—resulting in a battle over resources and the future of the West. Las Vegas may attract 39 million visitors a year, but the tourists mesmerized by the dancing water fountains at the Bellagio don’t ask where the water comes from. They don’t see a city with the nation’s highest rates of foreclosure, unemployment, and suicide. They don’t see the astonishing drop in the water level of Lake Mead—where Sin City gets 90 percent of its water supply. Nies shows how the struggle over Black Mesa lands is an example of a global phenomenon in which giant transnational corporations have the power to separate indigenous people from their energy-rich lands with the help of host governments. Unreal City explores how and why resources have been taken from native lands, what it means in an era of climate change, and why, in this city divorced from nature, the only thing more powerful than money is water.


Playing the Odds

Playing the Odds

Author: Hal K. Rothman

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2007-10-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0826354106

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"This collection of Hal Rothman's wide-ranging, brash, and brilliant essays on Las Vegas offers up a treasury of insights on the follies and possibilities of the New West. Confident, passionate, learned and, yes, wise, Rothman is simply one of the most important voices writing on the region today. He is also a hell of a lot of fun to read." - Virginia Scharff, professor of history and Director, Center for the Southwest, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and Women of the West chair at the Institute for the Study of the American West, Autry National Center, Los Angeles "Hal Rothman has been enlightening me, irritating me, surprising me, and making me laugh for twenty years. Reading his columns reminds me why. He has long been one of the brashest, loudest, smartest, and most original voices in the West. Not even ALS could quiet him. These columns aren't the same as talking to him, but they come close." - Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University "Hal Rothman is both the greatest Western historian of his generation and an H. L. Mencken in cowboy boots. Here is a magnificent collection of his opinion, wit, and wisdom." - Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Buda's Wagon


Community Action against Racism in West Las Vegas

Community Action against Racism in West Las Vegas

Author: Robert J. McKee

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-02-27

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 0739186787

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book chronicles Robert J. McKee's active participation in a successful protest action, led primarily by black females in the historically African American community of West Las Vegas, Nevada, from 2008-2013. The residents protested the closure of a main street (F Street) in their community for the expansion of Interstate 15. The community felt the street closure was racially motivated, with the intent of further alienating and isolating this already marginalized community. The street closure was one of many instances in a protracted history of events that further exacerbated race relations in Las Vegas. With only minimal support from the black church, courageous women mobilized their community from a neighborhood coalition into a successful community protest group, despite resistance from city officials and a racist backlash from some Las Vegas residents. The key players in this work were then-Mayor Oscar Goodman, State Senator and now U.S. Congressman Steven Horsford, and a host of local and state leaders. The closing of F Street creates an environ for McKee to discuss the current problems of race relations, urban sociology, city planning, social action, ethnography, and institutionalized racism.