Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century

Hal Rothman

Oct 2015 · Routledge

About this ebook

Praise for the Previous Edition (0 415 92612 2): ...lively and provocative...this book will teach you something startling on nearly every page... --The New York Times Book Review Like the Emerald City, Las Vegas glitters brightly in the vast Nevada desert, a haven for refugees from ordinary America. A hip, iconic, playground that exports nothing, it nonetheless earns billions from consumer services alone -- gambling, hotels, gaming, and entertainment. It is, historian Hal Rothman argues, the quintessential city of the future. As other cities try to mirror its success and huge, respectable corporations like Coca-Cola invest in a piece of the pie, the very traits that have ostracized Las Vegas in the past -- hedonism, money worship, and permissiveness -- have today made it America's fastest growing urban center. From the gambling-driven, mob-run Sin City of the 1940s to the corporatization of the Strip as a respectable family entertainment center after the 1970s, Las Vegas has shown incredible economic resilience and adaptability. The first full account of America's new dream capital, Neon Metropolis brilliantly shows how Las Vegas gambled on the post-industrial service economy well before the rest of the country knew it was coming, and won.

About the author

Hal Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the editor of the journal Environmental History. The author of Devil's Bargains:Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West, Rothman is a frequent commentator on Las Vegas. He has been featured on National Public Radio, CBS Sunday Morning, and in The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal and in the four-hour A&E Television Network documentary, LasVegas.