Like the Emerald City, Las Vegas glitters brightly in the vast Nevada desert, a haven for refugees from the ordinary America. A hip, iconic, playground that exports nothing, it nonetheless earns billions from consumer services alone.
As other cities try to mirror its success, and huge respectable corporations like Coca-Cola invest in a piece of the pie, the very traits that have ostracized Las Vegas in the past - hedonism, money worship and permissiveness have today made it America's fastest growing urban center. From the gambling-driven, mob-run Sin City of the 1940s to the corporatization of the Strip as a respectable family entertainment center after the 1970s, Las Vegas has shown incredible economic resilience and adaptability.
The first full account of America's new dream capital, this book brilliantly shows how Las Vegas gambled on the post-industrial service economy, well before the rest of the country knew it was coming, and won.

Neon Metropolis offers a panoramic, entertaining account of contemporary Las Vegas, long America's capital of excess and now its fastest growing city. Combining a history of the city's growth via gambling and crime, with a richly descriptive social portrait of contemporary Las Vegas, author Hal Rothman shows how the city has shed its stigma as "Sin City", and is now setting the pace for nationwide trends in leisure, work, consumption, immigration, demographics, and city growth. Ultimately, as Neon Metropolis amply documents, the problems and opportunities facing Las Vegas are ones that, increasingly, confront all of America.

Through the pages of "Environmental History Review, " now "Environmental History", an entire discipline has been created and defined over time through the publication of the finest scholarship by humanists, social and natural scientists, and other professionals concerned with the complex relationship between people and our global environment. "Out of the Woods" gathers together the best of this scholarship.

Covering a broad array of topics and reflecting the continuing diversity within the field of environmental history, "Out of the Woods" begins with three theoretical pieces by William Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, and Donald Worster probing the assumptions that underlie the words and ideas historians use to analyze human interaction with the physical world. One of these - the concept of place - is the subject of a second group of essays. The political context is picked up in the third section, followed by a selection of some of the journal's most recent contributions discussing the intersection between urban and environmental history. Water's role in defining the contours of the human and natural landscape is undeniable and forms the focus of the fifth section. Finally, the global character of environmental issues emerges in three compelling articles by Alfred Crosby, Thomas Dunlap, and Stephen Pyne.

Of interest to a wide range of scholars in environmental history, law, and politics, "Out of the Woods" is intended as a reader for course use and abenchmark for the field of environmental history as it continues to develop into the next century.

If Lyndon Baines Johnson was larger than life, the family ranch with which he identified, which he and Lady Bird fondly called their "heart's home," and which he made the Texas White House during his five years as president, was part of the reason. In this innovative history of the Johnson Ranch, its ethos and operation, Hal K. Rothman has told a story unlike any other in western history. It is a story of national and even international dimensions, yet truly grounded in the Texas earth. It is a story of the relationship between power and place in American culture.
The Johnson Ranch, to which LBJ took foreign dignitaries and national political leaders and to which he himself returned often while in office for renewal and perspective, represented the "real" America to many of its visitors. For many Americans (and perhaps for Johnson himself), the Texas White House evoked the national ethos about rural America and family ties, yet it also had rapid access by jet and the most sophisticated communications system in the world.
In this detailed and engagingly written account of the way the ranch was used during Johnson's years in public office, readers will learn who visited, how they were fed and entertained and how LBJ conducted the nation's business while there. Readers will also get a fascinating interpretation of the role of the ranch in forming Johnson's own self-image, in promoting Johnson and his rags-to-riches story to the voting public, and in offering Johnson in retirement the one thing he truly craved: control. The Johnson Ranch offers a fascinating insight into the meaning of place in American politics and culture.
After the president's death, and in accordance with Johnson's wishes, parts of the ranch were incorporated into the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park, which now consists of the Boyhood Home in Johnson City, the Birthplace, the Johnson Settlement, and the Texas White House. Through the experiences it represents, which are an integral part of Johnson's legacy, it has become one more way in which this dynamic president has influenced U.S. history.

"Got the fire under control. My knees have scabbed over and feel pretty good today, but my hands are in a hell of a shape. Damned if I'll ever fight fire with my bare hands again."

Typical of turn-of-the-century forest rangers in the Inland Northwest-northern Idaho, western Montana, and eastern Washington-this diarist faced fire and other tribulations far from civilization, often alone on foot or horseback, with little equipment and no means of communication.

In this engaging collection, Hal Rothman has selected and provided context for the best and most informative letters written by early foresters. Highly literate and perceptive, the writers illuminate how they were forced to balance the agency's regulatory impulses with the needs of rural communities that depended upon forests for their livelihood. They reveal much about the challenges they met-autonomous decision-making; fire fighting and prevention; opposition and pressure from local residents; occasional corruption or incompetence; and changing technology and agency expectations. Family life, isolation, and loneliness, they show, could also be challenging. "It got so lonely my dog couldn't stand it," wrote Edward G. Stahl. "He went down to the Kootenai River and howled 'til the ferryman from Gateway came over and took him across to town."

Facing bitter cold and heavy snow in the winter and often flames in the summer (1,700 fires in 1910 alone blackened millions of acres and killed 80 fire fighters) foresters managed to persevere with limited resources, Rothman shows. They surveyed land, enforced regulations, evaluated homestead claims, inventoried resources, organized timber sales, let grazing permits, built infrastructure, and handled many unusual situations that came their way.

O. O. Lansdale became judge, jury, and undertaker upon finding two dead men on the trail. "It was up to me, acting as coroner, to hold an inquest and bury them. Being all alone, the inquest was easy-just a case of dispensation of Providence. The burial was not so easy. Digging two graves with a piece of cedar board; then, with a rope around their feet, dragging them to their graves with the rope around the saddle horse."

As the century progressed and technology advanced, the writers show, the Forest Service evolved. Locals, who constituted the early organization, were gradually replaced by college-trained foresters, and tourism became more prevalent as primitive conditions were overcome.

"My first realization of this change came one day when I was walking along the road toward the nursery," wrote David Olson. "A large black sedan drew up from behind and stopped. A liveried chauffeur asked if I wanted a ride. Looking into the car, I saw two elderly ladies sitting in rocking chairs. They smiled and one of them said they were seeing the wild West."

With the stroke of a pen, Theodore Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908. Without his quick action, commercial developers, already coveting this national treasure, would have invaded the canyon's floor. Not until eleven years later did Congress make it a national park, an act that provided funds for development and preservation unavailable to national monuments. According to Hal Rothman, the designation of national monument--decided at the discretion of the president--was the saving grace for many natural and archaeologically significant sites as debates on national park designations languished in Congress. But lacking sufficient financial backing, national monuments inevitably ended up taking a back seat to the national park system in the early twentieth century. Looking at the history of the national monuments, from the passage of the Antiquities Act of 1906--allowing for presidential designation of monuments--to the present, Rothman traces the evolution of federal preservation. He shows how laws, policies, personalities, personal and bureaucratic rivalries, and a changing cultural climate affected preservation efforts. And he illustrates how the national park system has functioned and changed over the years as public officials have tried to implement federal policy at the grassroots level. The Antiquities Act, he contends, has been undervalued and ignored by contemporary observers and historians. In fact, he demonstrates, it is the most important piece of preservation legislation ever enacted by the U.S. government. Without it, many significant sites would have been destroyed as a result of congressional inertia and indifference. Rothman examines the evolution of this vital legislation, originally designed to preserve archaeological sites in the Southwest but later also used to maintain other significant prehistoric, historic, and natural features. He explains how the act became less significant as New Deal financing became available for the park system in the 1930s; how expansion and reorganization of the National Park Service brought more money and status to national monuments; and how, by the 1960s, national monuments had been integrated into the modern management system for park areas. Set in the context of the regulatory century, this book offers important new insights about how the American past has been preserved and packaged for the public.

"Rothman and Davis have given us not only the gritty, often ugly reality behind the nation's brightest lights but also the touching human drama that is the essence of our most emblematic and enigmatic city. From the grind joints of Glitter Gulch to the mammoth theme hotels of the twenty-first-century Strip, this collection blends marvelously the best old-fashioned scholarship and investigative reporting with the finest postmodern literary sensibility and journalism. To understand the new West, and thus the new century's America, begin here."--Sally Denton and Roger Morris, authors of "The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000

"Like rabbits mesmerized by a snake, cultural critics have been locked onto the public spectacle of Las Vegas for so long they've taken its facades for its entirety. But what is now surely the greatest show on earth is in every sense of the word a production. That production requires extraordinary natural resources and the grueling labor offstage of producers-hotel maids, construction workers-and as a byproduct has generated a vast city that says far more about the scary state of things than all the sequins on all the nipples on the strip. "Grit Beneath the Glitter gets that picture whole, in an exhilarating, unsettling way."--Rebecca Solnit, author of "Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism and "Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West

"Most of us have ideas about Las Vegas. (In 1999 it surpassed Mecca as the world's top tourist attraction.) But what is it like to live there, to work there? How long can it keep reshaping itself and what does its examplemean for the future? In this book, artists, critics, and scholars, all with an intimate knowledge of the place, combine forces to explain this latest version of the American dream, compelling the attention of anyone interested in what the urban future holds. Their insights will amaze you."--Carol A. O'Connor, co-editor of "The Oxford History of the American West

"There is no other book about Las Vegas, that 'playground of paradox, ' as entertaining or fascinating as this. In puzzling over whether Las Vegas is a place of 'resounding ordinariness' or 'the latest in American dream capitals, ' the contributors to this volume serve up a veritable banquet of delicious mind-food, one delicious entree following another. Bravo!"--Dennis R. Judd, co-author of "The Tourist City

From Yellowstone to the Great Smoky Mountains, America's national parks are sprawling tracts of serenity, most of them carved out of public land for recreation and preservation around the turn of the last century. America has changed dramatically since then, and so has its conceptions of what parkland ought to be.

In this book, one of our premier environmental historians looks at the new phenomenon of urban parks, focusing on San Francisco's Golden Gate National Recreation Area as a prototype for the twenty-first century. Cobbled together from public and private lands in a politically charged arena, the GGNRA represents a new direction for parks as it highlights the long-standing tension within the National Park Service between preservation and recreation.

Long a center of conservation, the Bay Area was well positioned for such an innovative concept. Writing with insight and wit, Rothman reveals the many complex challenges that local leaders, politicians, and the NPS faced as they attempted to administer sites in this area. He tells how Representative Phillip Burton guided a comprehensive bill through Congress to establish the park and how he and others expanded the acreage of the GGNRA, redefined its mission to the public, forged an identity for interconnected parks, and struggled against formidable odds to obtain the San Francisco Presidio and convert it into a national park.

Engagingly written, "The New Urban Park" offers a balanced examination of grassroots politics and its effect on municipal, state, and federal policy. While most national parks dominate the economies of their regions, GGNRA was from the start tied to the multifaceted needs of its public and political constituents-including neighborhood, ethnic, and labor interests as well as the usual supporters from the conservation movement.

As a national recreation area, GGNRA helped redefine that category in the public mind. By the dawn of the new century, it had already become one of the premier national park areas in terms of visitation. Now as public lands become increasingly scarce, GGNRA may well represent the future of national parks in America. Rothman shows that this model works, and his book will be an invaluable resource for planning tomorrow's parks.

The West is popularly perceived as America's last outpost of unfettered opportunity, but twentieth-century corporate tourism has transformed it into America's "land of opportunism." From Sun Valley to Santa Fe, towns throughout the West have been turned over to outsiders-and not just to those who visit and move on, but to those who stay and control.

Although tourism has been a blessing for many, bringing economic and cultural prosperity to communities without obvious means of support or allowing towns on the brink of extinction to renew themselves; the costs on more intangible levels may be said to outweigh the benefits and be a devil's bargain in the making.

Hal Rothman examines the effect of twentieth-century tourism on the West and exposes that industry's darker side. He tells how tourism evolved from Grand Canyon rail trips to Sun Valley ski weekends and Disneyland vacations, and how the post-World War II boom in air travel and luxury hotels capitalized on a surge in discretionary income for many Americans, combined with newfound leisure time.

From major destinations like Las Vegas to revitalized towns like Aspen and Moab, Rothman reveals how the introduction of tourism into a community may seem innocuous, but residents gradually realize, as they seek to preserve the authenticity of their communities, that decision-making power has subtly shifted from the community itself to the newly arrived corporate financiers. And because tourism often results in a redistribution of wealth and power to "outsiders," observes Rothman, it represents a new form of colonialism for the region.

By depicting the nature of tourism in the American West through true stories of places and individuals that have felt its grasp, Rothman doesn't just document the effects of tourism but provides us with an enlightened explanation of the shape these changes take. Deftly balancing historical perspective with an eye for what's happening in the region right now, his book sets new standards for the study of tourism and is one that no citizen of the West whose life is touched by that industry can afford to ignore.