Becoming Americas Playground

Author : Larry Dale Gragg
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780806163512
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming America's Playground written by Larry Dale Gragg and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story of the emergence of Las Vegas as the premier tourist destination in the nation during the pivotal decade of the 1950s"--

Author : Larry D. Gragg
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN 13 : 0806165855
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming America's Playground written by Larry D. Gragg and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Paul J Vanderwood
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 082239166X
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Satan's Playground written by Paul J Vanderwood and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Keith Krumwiede
Publisher : Park Publishing (WI)
ISBN 13 : 9783038600022
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Atlas of Another America written by Keith Krumwiede and published by Park Publishing (WI). This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Author : Ney C. Landrum
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 0826264441
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The State Park Movement in America written by Ney C. Landrum and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2013-08-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essentially a phenomenon of the twentieth century, America’s pioneering state park movement has grown rapidly and innovatively to become one of the most important forces in the preservation of open spaces and the provision of public outdoor recreation in the country. During this time, the movement has been influenced and shaped by many factors—social, cultural, and economic—resulting in a wide variety of expressions. While everyone agrees that the state park movement has been a positive and beneficial force on the whole, there seems to be an increasing divergence of thought as to exactly what direction the movement should take in the future. In The State Park Movement in America, Ney Landrum, recipient of almost two dozen honors and awards for his service to state and national parks, places the movement for state parks in the context of the movements for urban and local parks on one side and for national parks on the other. He traces the evolution of the state park movement from its imprecise and largely unconnected origins to its present status as an essential and firmly established state government responsibility, nationwide in scope. Because the movement has taken a number of separate, but roughly parallel, paths and produced differing schools of thought concerning its purpose and direction, Landrum also analyzes the circumstances and events that have contributed to these disparate results and offers critical commentary based on his long tenure in the system. As the first study of its kind, The State Park Movement in America will fill a tremendous void in the literature on parks. Given that there are more than five thousand state parks in the United States, compared with fewer than five hundred national parks and historic sites, this history is long overdue. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with federal, state, or local parks, as well as to land resource managers generally.

Author : Amy Meyer
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520929292
Total Pages : 549 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New Guardians for the Golden Gate written by Amy Meyer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National parks are a distinctively American idea. But it takes people to make them happen. This unique, insider's account tells how Bay Area activists forged bipartisan local and national support for an unprecedented campaign to create a great new national park. In 1970, beginning with the former Army lands originally reserved to protect San Francisco Bay, the grassroots People for a Golden Gate National Recreation Area succeeded in preserving all of the spectacular land that frames the Golden Gate. Spanning more than thirty eventful years, Amy Meyer tells the story of how dedicated citizens, including visionary conservationist Edgar Wayburn, master politician Phillip Burton, and a battalion of lesser-known but key allies made our democratic system work for the common good and won their fight to save these dramatic and historic lands for all of the American people. Pictures by noted California photographers capture the park’s grandeur and new activities. New Guardians for the Golden Gate tells how a bold vision, dedicated citizens, and a variety of old and new conservation strategies saved these magnificent lands for all time.

Author : Carlton S. Van Doren
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 44 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America's Park and Recreation Heritage written by Carlton S. Van Doren and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Appian Way of America written by and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : David M. Sokol
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780738507125
Total Pages : 132 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Oak Park, Illinois written by David M. Sokol and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immediately west of Chicago, where the Eisenhower Expressway narrows, sits Oak Park, a village proud of its rich tradition of cultural and social diversity. This birthplace of Ernest Hemingway and Doris Humphrey, the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Percy Julian, is a cultural Mecca in the Midwest, with an internationally recognized reputation for its impressive array of architecture. From Victorian mansions and Neo-classical structures to Prairie School buildings and exciting contemporary architecture, Oak Park is more than just a successful residential suburb of Chicago. While the faces of its most famous citizens are recognizable, it is the creativity of its people and the beauty of its built environment that make this community so unique. In Oak Park, Illinois: Continuity and Change, the author explores the way the Village has continuously adapted to a changing world while maintaining the principles and drive that have always made Oak Park an exciting place to live and visit. As Oak Park awaits its Centennial in 2002, its citizens are facing and welcoming the challenges ahead. Long time Villagers and newer residents alike embrace the opportunities for growth and evolution, within the framework of continuity and change.

Author : David Barnes
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780738584355
Total Pages : 132 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Park Ridge written by David Barnes and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1835, immigrants began to arrive from New York and New England to the area first called Pennyville, later renamed Brickton to reflect its leading industry, then finally incorporated as the Village of Park Ridge in 1873. The name originates from the village's park-like setting and an erroneous belief that the ridge at Johnston's Circle--today the three-way intersection of Touhy, Prospect, and Northwest Highway--was the highest point in Cook County. Notable names associated with Park Ridge include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and actor Harrison Ford, who both attended Maine East High School; Chicago Cubs great Ron Santo, who operated a popular pizzeria in town; and painter Grant Wood, whose American Gothic is one of the 20th century's great works of Americana. Anchored by the landmark Pickwick Theater, a fine example of art deco architecture built in 1928, downtown Park Ridge has changed much over the years, a transformation captured so well in the pages of this book.