Can I read Becoming America's Playground : Las Vegas in the 1950s on EtoBox?

Becoming America's Playground : Las Vegas in the 1950s by Larry Dale Gragg is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Becoming America's Playground : Las Vegas in the 1950s about?

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.

Who reads Becoming America's Playground : Las Vegas in the 1950s?

Author

Larry Dale Gragg

Publisher

University of Oklahoma Press

Published

2019

Language

EN

ISBN

9780806165851

Category

history

Subjects

History, Travel, Sociology

Rating

3.4 / 5 (9 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14