{"product_id":"becoming-americas-playground-larry-d-gragg-9780806163512","title":"Becoming America's Playground: Las Vegas in the 1950s","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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. \u003cem\u003eBecoming America's Playground\u003c\/em\u003e chronicles the vice and the toil that gave Las Vegas its worldwide reputation in those transformative years.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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. \u003cem\u003eBecoming America's Playground\u003c\/em\u003e brings this pivotal decade in Las Vegas into sharp focus for the first time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Larry D. Gragg\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0806163518\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780806163512\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Oklahoma Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 08\/13\/2019\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 290\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.94lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.65d","brand":"Larry D. Gragg","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":43992462328063,"sku":"9780806163512","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_f2fe24d0-1cb0-44c0-94d2-b62927525972.jpg?v=1683319079","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/becoming-americas-playground-larry-d-gragg-9780806163512","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}