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Reno, Nevada is one of the best communities in the nation for outdoor recreational opportunities. With over three hundred days of sunshine a year, the weather beckons residents and visitors alike to step outside and enjoy a casual stroll in a city park, a stiff climb to the top of one of the area’s surrounding mountains, or just about anything in between. White offers the most complete guide for walkers, joggers, runners, and hikers to the best paths and trails in the greater Reno-Sparks region.

This guide provides readers the most complete and detailed information for each excursion, from the Truckee River corridor to the Northern Valleys, including lakes, parks, trails, and mountains. Whether you are looking for a short and easy stroll on a paved path along one of the city’s greenbelts, or an extended hike into the mountains of the Mount Rose wilderness, this is your all-inclusive resource. White is one of the area’s foremost experts on the outdoors, and he includes interesting sidebars about human and natural history for each trip. This is a guide for anyone who enjoys a stroll, walk, or hike in and around Northern Nevada’s premier outdoor playgrounds.

This is an entertaining and anecdotal treatment of Reno's history. Wonderfully illustrated with dozens of black & white photographs, the authors uncover some little known facts and enlighten readers about Reno's colorful past and the parade of larger-than-life characters who left their mark on the city, including: pathfinder John C. Frémont who named the river coursing down from Lake Tahoe after his Paiute guide, Truckee; railroad barons who plotted out the financial heart of Nevada; gambling kings who ran strings of prostitutes and laundered money for gangsters like Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger; the celebrities who made Reno a divorce mecca; the carnival barker named Pappy Smith who invented Harrold Club; bingo man Bill Harrah who made Nevada the entertainment capital of the world.

This completely revised and updated edition of A Short History of Reno provides an entertaining and informative account of Reno’s remarkably colorful history. Richard Moreno discusses Reno’s efforts, from its early beginnings in the 1850s to the present day, to reinvent itself as a recreation, entertainment, education, and technology hub. Moreno looks at the gamblers, casino builders, and performers who helped create the world-famous gaming industry, and he considers the celebrities who came to end unhappy marriages, back when Reno was “the divorce capital of the world.”
 
Moreno brings the city’s history up-to-date with coverage of the businesspeople and civic leaders who helped make Reno an attraction that still lures millions of visitors each year. Today’s travelers and residents explore Reno’s flamboyant heart and scenic wonders, topics the author examines in an accessible and lively fashion.

Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era “dumps,” places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces the concept of “depressive modernity,” an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and progressive modernity—capitalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration—are thrown into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill. Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory, language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place.

An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status as the island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West’s “dump of dreams,” in which the introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present, exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America.

Eugene P. Moehring analyzes the development of Reno and Las Vegas since 1945 with special emphasis on the years after 1970. Major factors that shaped the development of both cities were the growth of corporate gaming and megaresorts and increased personal leisure and affluence. Moehring provides an engaging, informative, and readable history of the divergent paths that Reno and Las Vegas took over the past forty years. Reno, the nation’s gambling mecca in the 1950s, led the way, developing the successful tourist economy that Las Vegas later embraced. Through the 1970s the two cities resembled each other greatly, but Las Vegas grew to achieve global significance, while Reno slowly declined, searching for new industries to power its future. Moehring shows that the development of the Las Vegas Strip was crucial to southern Nevada’s success. The casinos, hotels, and entertainments of the Strip, and the workers they supported, formed a new urban center ringed by offices, residences, shopping, and a major university. In effect, it became a third metropolis, governed by county commissioners, larger than Reno and Las Vegas combined.

Moehring brings the story of the three cities to the present day, examining lessons learned from the Great Recession and the efforts under way in all three metropolises to diversify their economies. Moehring makes an important contribution with the only current study of Nevada’s cities, focusing on urban development issues rather than social history or the gaming industry. As the service economy continues to grow, not only in Nevada but throughout the United States, Moehring’s work has many implications for urban studies and particularly the study of urban development in other metropolitan areas.

Over 157 years ago—before there was a Reno, Nevada; before there was a state of Nevada; and even before there was a Nevada Territory—there was a bridge over the Truckee River at a narrow, deeply rutted cattle and wagon trail that would one day become Virginia Street. There was also a small rustic inn and tavern occupying a plot of ground at the southern end of the log-and-timber bridge, catering to thirsty cowboys, drovers, and miners. The inn and the bridge were the first two structures in what would one day be a bustling metropolitan area, and to this day they still form the nucleus of the city. The Genesis of Reno traces their history up to the present day. The 111 year-old concrete bridge that was replaced in 2016 by a magnificent new structure was honored for its longevity and unique character with placement on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
 

When the City of Reno decided at the beginning of this century to create a trench to lower the railroad tracks that ran through its center, archaeologists associated with the ReTRAC (Reno Transportation Rail Access Corridor) project had a unique opportunity to explore the evidence of thousands of years of human history locked beneath downtown’s busy streets. The River and the Railroad traces the people and events that shaped the city, incorporating archaeological findings to add a more tangible physical dimension to the known history. It offers fascinating insights into the lives of many different people from Reno’s past and helps to correct some common misperceptions about the history of the American West.