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.

"Survey of Historic Costume presents a thorough overview and chronology of Western dress from the ancient world to the trends of today"--

An innovative anthology showcasing Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories Our Voices, Our Histories brings together thirty-five Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond. This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, from the politics of language, to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States. Our Voices, Our Histories showcases how new approaches in US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and Women’s and Gender studies inform research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Attending to the collective voices of the women themselves, the volume seeks to transform current understandings of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories.

Educational resource for teachers, parents and kids!

In the golden age of the showgirl, dancers were treated like royalty. But Las Vegas legend Betty Bunch was no pampered princess. In her thirty years on the stage, screen, and television, she faced everything from a threatening tiger and menacing movie elephants to leering mob men and bait-in-switch producers.Betty impressed and worked with many of the day's best known stars. She danced in the movies South Pacific, Bells Are Ringing, Imitation of Life and others, as well as performing at nine Las Vegas resorts. Betty spent time on the road as a featured dancer with Tony Martin, Louis Prima and and the Witnesses, Jimmy Durante, and three television specials with Dean Martin. She was a featured performer in the original company of Bottoms Up at Caesars Palace.In recognition of Betty's talent, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada's largest daily newspaper named her as one of Las Vegas' best showgirls of all time.

Spending quiet moments to reflect and renew at the end of your day can bring you untold inner serenity. Home, family, friends, and neighbors--these are a woman's "garden," her sphere of influence. Quin Sherrer shows you how to cultivate and tend your garden to reap a bountiful spiritual harvest. Based on Sherrer's own personal experiences, these delightful, sometimes heartrending stories will encourage you to gain the most from each day--no matter how chaotic or ordinary it may seem at the time. Do you feel overworked? Or somehow out of balance? Are you too often fearful, angry, or unforgiving? Quin Sherrer has been there, too, and emerged stronger than ever with the help of the Lord. Good Night, Lord is the perfect way to end your day and begin tomorrow renewed!

These writings provide a unique view of the height of 17th-century French culture.