At the beginning of the twentieth century, Las Vegas was a dusty, isolated desert town. By century’s end, it was the country’s fastest-growing city, a world-class travel destination with a lucrative tourist industry hosting millions of visitors a year. This transformation came about in large part because of a symbiotic relationship between airlines, the city, and the airport, facilitated by the economic democratization and deregulation of the airline industry, the development of faster and more comfortable aircraft, and the ambitious vision of Las Vegas city leaders and casino owners. Landing in Las Vegas is a compelling study of the role of fast, affordable transportation in overcoming the vast distances of the American West and binding western urban centers to the national and international tourism, business, and entertainment industries.

Las Vegas in Singapore looks at the collision of the histories of Singapore and Las Vegas in the form of Marina Bay Sands, one of Singapore’s two integrated resorts.

The first history begins in colonial Singapore in the 1880s, when British administrators revised gambling laws in response to the political threat posed by Chinese-run gambling syndicates. Following the tracks of these punitive laws and practices, the book moves into the 1960s when the newly independent city-state created a national lottery while criminalizing both organized and petty gambling in the name of nation-building. The second history shifts the focus to corporate Las Vegas in the 1950s when digital technology and corporate management practices found each other on the casino floor. Tracing the emergence of the specialist casino designer, the book reveals how casino development evolved into a highly rationalized spatial template designed to maximize profits. Today an iconic landmark of Singapore, Marina Bay Sands is also an artifact of these two histories, an attempt by Singapore to normalize what was once criminalized in its nationalist history.

Lee Kah-Wee argues that the historical project of the control of vice is also about the control of space and capital. The result is an uneven landscape where the legal and moral status of gambling is contingent on where it is located. As the current wave of casino expansion spreads across Asia, he warns that these developments should not be seen as liberalization but instead as a continuation of the project of concentrating power by modern states and corporations.

This expanded edition is the perfect book for the southern Nevada-bound traveler or the armchair adventurer. The very name of the city conjures a collection of images: fun, excitement, escape . . . or, more concretely, mega-sized hotels and casinos, spectacular showrooms, theme parks, and marquees as large as office buildings lit with the names of the biggest stars.
Las Vegas: The Great American Playground, illustrated with many fine historical photographs, traces the city’s history from its first Native American occupants more than 10,000 years ago to its present status as a premier tourist destination. It is the story of a group of colorful, enterprising individuals who made the desert bloom with undreamed-of possibilities.

In this collection of sixteen short stories, Robert Laxalt illuminates the Nevada of the 1950s. Written when Laxalt was in his twenties, the stories are as fresh as if they were penned yesterday. Humanity good and bad, humor and cruelty, satire and adventure are found in these early stories of a Nevada poised on the brink of change.

In the lead story, Cowboy Clint Hamilton laments that the town is “getting more like a big city every day” as the traditional gambling joints of earlier times give way to the gaudy casinos that will soon become modern glitz.

Sobering experiences from his days as a reporter give Laxalt an insight into murderers and prison life and lethal gas chambers. In a chilling short story, “The Snake Pen,” we find the seed of Robert Laxalt’s celebrated novel, A Man In the Wheatfield.

These seven precedent-setting case studies taken from the files of the Nevada Gaming Control Board and Commission illustrate vital issues addressed in the first decade of Las Vegas' megaresorts.

Over 200 writings about Nevada with selections from Native American tales to contemporary writings on urban experience and environmental concerns. The state of Nevada embodies paradox and contradiction—home to one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation and to isolated ranches scattered across a sparsely populated backcountry. Nevada is a place where the lust for sudden wealth has prompted both wild mining booms and glittering casinos, and where forbidding atomic test sites coexist with alluring tourist meccas. The variety and distinctiveness of Nevada’s landscape and peoples have inspired writers from the beginning of immigrant contact with the region. This contact has produced abundant literary wealth that includes the rich oral traditions of Native American peoples and an amazing spectrum of contemporary voices. Literary Nevada is the first comprehensive literary anthology of Nevada. It contains over 200 selections ranging from traditional Native American tales, explorers’ and emigrants’ accounts, and writing from the Comstock Lode and other mining boomtowns, as well as compelling fiction, poetry, and essays from throughout the state’s history. There is work by well-known Nevada writers such as Sarah Winnemucca, Mark Twain, and Robert Laxalt, by established and emerging writers from all parts of the state, and by some nonresident authors whose work illuminates important facets of the Nevada experience. The book includes cowboy poetry, travel writing, accounts of nuclear Nevada, narratives about rural life and urban life in Las Vegas and Reno, poetry and fiction from the state’s best contemporary writers, and accounts of the special beauty of wild Nevada’s mountains and deserts. Editor Cheryll Glotfelty provides insightful introductions to each section and author. The book also includes a photo gallery of selected Nevada writers and a generous list of suggested further readings. Nevada has inspired an exceptionally rich panorama of fine writing and a dazzling array of literary voices. The selections in Literary Nevada will engage and delight readers while revealing the complex and exciting diversity of the state’s history, people, and life.

In 1972, Dennis Parks, a young potter with a promising academic career ahead of him, decided to move to Tuscarora, a near-abandoned mining town in remote northeastern Nevada. Parks and his wife were attracted to Tuscarora's isolation and beautiful setting, and they believed that it might be a healthy environment in which to raise their two small sons. This is Parks' account of his family's life in Tuscarora, a tiny settlement whose population even forty years later numbers fewer than twenty permanent residents.

Parks created a pottery school that attracts students from around the world and developed for himself an international reputation as the creator of powerful, innovative works in clay. Meanwhile, he and his family had to master the skills required of those who choose to live in the back country--growing and hunting their own food, renovating or building from scratch the structures they needed for residences or studios, resolving conflicts with neighbors, inventing their own amusements. The transformation from middle-class urbanity to small-town simplicity is, as Parks reveals, a lurching and sometimes hilarious process, and the achievement of self-sufficiency is similarly fraught with unexpected challenges.

The nature of the Old and New West is fully reflected through dialects, beliefs, occupations, and actions in this collection of thirteen plays with complete stage directions. Set in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah from the mid-1800s to the present day and focusing on veterans, children, prostitutes, priests, the newborn, and newly dead, these one-acts written by playwrights who know the region give voice to those who created and continue to recreate the West. This collection of contemporary plays, written out of love and concern for the region, examines as never before the western myths rooted in the national psyche. The characters battle limits, deny fate, and seek new beginnings. The plays examine symptoms, pose questions, and seek answers about the past and present West.