Larry D. Gragg's Books

Becoming America's Playground

Las Vegas in the 1950s

By: Larry D. Gragg

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Becoming America's Playground

Las Vegas in the 1950s

By: Larry D. Gragg

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.

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Page Count

404

Publisher

University of Oklahoma Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806165537

ISBN 13

9780806165530

John F. Kennedy

A Biography

By: Michael E. Meagher Ph.D.,Larry D. Gragg

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John F. Kennedy

A Biography

By: Michael E. Meagher Ph.D.,Larry D. Gragg

This biography examines the life and political career of a president whose idealism and policies continue to impact the world today despite his brief time in office. John F. Kennedy is revered as one of the United States' most iconic and inspirational presidents. Among his historic accomplishments, however, Kennedy was also a human being who made tragic miscalculations in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, publicly expressed doubts about democracy, and supported the use of fear-based tactics to manipulate the American people. John F. Kennedy: A Biography provides background information about the Kennedy family in the early 20th century, describes the rise of Joseph P. Kennedy as a major figure in American life, and chronicles the subsequent emergence of his second son, John F. Kennedy, as a leading figure in American politics. The authors provide a fascinating look at how the characteristics of a 23-year-old John F. Kennedy in 1940 were borne out in his performance as president two decades later.

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Page Count

198

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0313354170

ISBN 13

9780313354175

Bugsy's Shadow

Moe Sedway, "Bugsy" Siegel, and the Birth of Organized Crime in Las Vegas

By: Larry D. Gragg

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Bugsy's Shadow

Moe Sedway, "Bugsy" Siegel, and the Birth of Organized Crime in Las Vegas

By: Larry D. Gragg

Early in the Prohibition era, Moe Sedway became part of the New York organized crime gang led by Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. A loyal and highly effective operative for Siegel, Sedway eventually gained monopoly control of the race wire service in Las Vegas and also became an effective casino manager of the Las Vegas Club, El Cortez, and the Rex Club. A breach in their relationship led to rumors that Sedway had gained Lansky’s approval for a “hit” on Siegel. The unsolved mystery of who murdered Bugsy in 1947 has spawned numerous theories about the identity of the hitman, but regardless of who pulled the trigger, Bugsy’s death opened the way for Moe to flourish as his own man at last. Long overshadowed by Bugsy in the annals of organized crime in America, Moe Sedway is now at last brought out into the light in this riveting tale of the sensational life and times of one of Vegas’s most mysterious and little-known figures.

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Page Count

232

Publisher

University of New Mexico Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826365167

ISBN 13

9780826365163

Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel

The Gangster, the Flamingo, and the Making of Modern Las Vegas

By: Larry D. Gragg

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Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel

The Gangster, the Flamingo, and the Making of Modern Las Vegas

By: Larry D. Gragg

This intriguing biography recounts the life of the legendary Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, revealing his true role in the development of Las Vegas and debunking some of the common myths about his notoriety. This account of the life of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel follows his beginnings in the Lower East Side of New York to his role in the development of the famous Flamingo Hotel and Casino. Larry D. Gragg examines Siegel's image as portrayed in popular culture, dispels the myths about Siegel's contribution to the founding of Las Vegas, and reveals some of the more lurid details about his life. Unlike previous biographies, this book is the first to make use of more than 2,400 pages of FBI files on Siegel, referencing documents about the reputed gangster in the New York City Municipal Archives and reviewing the 1950–51 testimony before the Senate Committee on organized crime. Chapters cover his early involvement with gangs in New York, his emergence as a favorite among the Hollywood elite in the late 1930s, his lucrative exploits in illegal gambling and horse racing, and his opening of the "fabulous" Flamingo in 1946. The author also draws upon the recollections of Siegel's eldest daughter to reveal a side of the mobster never before studied—the nature of his family life.

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Page Count

225

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

144080186X

ISBN 13

9781440801860

Englishmen Transplanted

The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660

By: Larry Dale Gragg

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Englishmen Transplanted

The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660

By: Larry Dale Gragg

Larry Gragg challenges the prevailing view of the seventeenth-century English planters of Barbados as architects of a social disaster. Most historians have described them as profligate and immoral, as grasping capitalists who exploited their servants and slaves in a quest for quick riches inthe cultivation of sugar. Yet, they were more than rapacious entrepreneurs. Like English emigrants to other regions in the empire, sugar planters transplanted many familiar governmental and legal institutions, eagerly started families, abided traditional views about the social order, and resistedcompromises in their diet, apparel, and housing, despite their tropical setting. Seldom becoming absentee planters, these Englishmen developed an extraordinary attraction to Barbados, where they saw themselves, as one group of planters explained in a petition, as 'being Englishmentransplanted'.

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