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Books > History > American history
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Becoming America's Playground - Las Vegas in the 1950s (Paperback)
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Becoming America's Playground - Las Vegas in the 1950s (Paperback)
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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.
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