2005 is Las Vegas' centennial year. This book, updated to take account of the dramatic changes that have taken place in the city since the 1970s, sheds light not only on the history of the city, but also provides insight into its future.

Americans, like their early European forebears and other world powers, realized that while farms, ranches, and other rural institutions were important, towns and cities were dynamic structures, capable of controlling and reorganizing space for miles and even hundred of miles beyond their municipal limits.... In their efforts to control and exploit outlying lands, America s Western cities and towns resembled ancient Athens, imperial Rome, renaissance Venice, and other great powers. So states noted historian Eugene P. Moehring in this new analysis of urbanism in the development of the American...

Since Las Vegas was founded on May 15, 1905, when the Union Pacific auctioned off land around its new railroad shops, the city has grown from a ramshackle village to a sprawling metropolitan area of well over a million people. Such phenomenal growth was never a sure thing--in its first decades, the town languished as a railroad company town and market center for nearby ranches and mines. The construction of Hoover Dam in the 1930s brought thousands of workers, some of whom decided to stay, and World War II and the Cold War brought others, including military personnel and workers at the Nevada...

The complete history of UNLV in celebration of its 50th anniversary. In 1951, the rapidly growing population of Las Vegas was demanding teachers for the city's burgeoning schools and an opportunity for local high school graduates to earn a university degree close to home. That year, Nevada's Board of Regents, the governing board of the state's system of higher education, initiated a post-high school program in Las Vegas as an extension branch of the University of Nevada in Reno. Few people at the time anticipated the fledgling institution's remarkable future. With an initial enrollment of...

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...