Becoming America's Playground

Becoming America's Playground
Author: Larry D. Gragg
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2019-08-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806165855

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.

Becoming America's Playground

Becoming America's Playground
Author: Larry D. Gragg
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2019-08-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806165537

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.

Satan's Playground

Satan's Playground
Author: Paul J Vanderwood
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2010-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 082239166X

Satan’s Playground chronicles the rise and fall of the tumultuous and lucrative gambling industry that developed just south of the U.S.-Mexico border in the early twentieth century. As prohibitions against liquor, horse racing, gambling, and prostitution swept the United States, the vice industry flourished in and around Tijuana, to the extent that reformers came to call the town “Satan’s Playground,” unintentionally increasing its licentious allure. The area was dominated by Agua Caliente, a large, elegant gaming resort opened by four entrepreneurial Border Barons (three Americans and one Mexican) in 1928. Diplomats, royalty, film stars, sports celebrities, politicians, patricians, and nouveau-riche capitalists flocked to Agua Caliente’s luxurious complex of casinos, hotels, cabarets, and sports extravaganzas, and to its world-renowned thoroughbred racetrack. Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Louis B. Mayer, the Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and the boxer Jack Dempsey were among the regular visitors. So were mobsters such as Bugsy Siegel, who later cited Agua Caliente as his inspiration for building the first such resort on what became the Las Vegas Strip. Less than a year after Agua Caliente opened, gangsters held up its money-car in transit to a bank in San Diego, killing the courier and a guard and stealing the company money pouch. Paul J. Vanderwood weaves the story of this heist gone wrong, the search for the killers, and their sensational trial into the overall history of the often-chaotic development of Agua Caliente, Tijuana, and Southern California. Drawing on newspaper accounts, police files, court records, personal memoirs, oral histories, and “true detective” magazines, he presents a fascinating portrait of vice and society in the Jazz Age, and he makes a significant contribution to the history of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Atlas of Another America

Atlas of Another America
Author: Keith Krumwiede
Publisher: Park Publishing (WI)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Architecture and society
ISBN: 9783038600022

"Owning a home is a cornerstone of the American Dream, the ultimate status symbol in the land of the free. But is the dream in crisis? Mass-marketed and endlessly multiplied, the suburban single-family house has become an instrument of global economic calamity and ongoing environmental catastrophe. Never before have we been so badly in need of a reassessment of our cultural values from an architectural perspective."--Back cover.

The Politics of Park Design

The Politics of Park Design
Author: Galen Cranz
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1982
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Galen Cranz surveys the rise of the park system from 1850 to the present through 4 stages - the pleasure ground, the reform park, the recreation facility and the open space system.

American Playgrounds

American Playgrounds
Author: Susan G. Solomon
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2005
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781584655176

A compelling history, a manifesto, and a manual for change.

Chain Reactions

Chain Reactions
Author: Lucy Jane Santos
Publisher: Icon Books
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2024-07-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1837731551

Tracing uranium's past, and how it intersects with our understanding of other radioactive elements, this book aims to disentangle our attitudes and to unpick the atomic mindset. Chain Reactions looks at the fascinating, often-forgotten, stories that can be found throughout the history of the element. Ranging from glassworks to penny stocks; medicines to weapons; something to be feared to a powerful source of energy, this global history not only explores the development of our scientific understanding of uranium, but also shines a light on its cultural and social impact. By understanding our nuclear past, we can move beyond the ideological opposition to atomic technology and encourage a more nuanced dialogue about whether it is feasible - and desirable - to have a genuinely nuclear-powered future.

American Grown

American Grown
Author: Michelle Obama
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2012-05-29
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 0307956024

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The former First Lady, author of Becoming, and producer and star of Waffles + Mochi tells the inspirational story of the White House Kitchen Garden and how gardens can transform our lives and the health of our communities. Early in her tenure as First Lady, despite being a novice gardener, Michelle Obama planted a kitchen garden on the White House’s South Lawn. To her delight, she watched as fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs sprouted from the ground. Soon the White House Kitchen Garden inspired a new conversation all across the country about the food we feed our families and the impact it has on the nutrition and well-being of our children. In American Grown, Mrs. Obama invites you inside the White House Kitchen Garden, from the first planting to the satisfaction of the seasonal harvest. She reveals her early worries and struggles—would the new plants even grow?—and her joy as lettuce, corn, tomatoes, collards and kale, sweet potatoes and rhubarb flourished in the freshly tilled soil. She shares the stories of other gardens that have moved and inspired her on her journey across the nation. And she offers what she learned about planting your own backyard, school, or community garden. American Grown features: • a behind-the-scenes look at every season of the garden’s growth • unique recipes created by White House chefs • striking original photographs that bring the White House garden to life • a fascinating history of community gardens in the United States From a modern-day vegetable truck that brings fresh produce to underserved communities in Chicago, to Houston office workers who make the sidewalk bloom, to a New York City school that created a scented garden for the visually impaired, to a garden in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that devotes its entire harvest to those less fortunate, American Grown isn’t just the story of a single garden. It’s a celebration of the bounty of our nation and a reminder of what we can all grow together.