Michael Green

Las Vegas Sun

The Las Vegas Sun is its city's second longest published newspaper, with a legendary past as a muckraker and crusader. It debuted on May 3, 1950, as the Las Vegas Free Press, a thrice-weekly newspaper founded by the International Typographical Union, which consisted of typesetters locked out of the Las Vegas Review-Journal for trying to unionize.

Las Vegas Strip: The First Boom

Since the late 1980s, the Las Vegas Strip has been in a manic building boom, creating some of the world's largest hotels and giving southern Nevada more than 130,000 hotel rooms. The ongoing boom is the latest in a series of transformations that began in the 1940s and 1950s. The concrete realities of doing business and the marketed image of a resort with illicit overtones have influenced every reincarnation of the Las Vegas Strip.

Las Vegas Review Journal

The Las Vegas Review-Journal is Nevada's largest newspaper and has been the flagship of two media empires. It began publishing as the Clark County Review on September 18, 1909. Founder Charles "Corky" Corkhill, then serving as Clark County's first sheriff, had edited the Las Vegas Age until its sale to Republican C.P. "Pop" Squires in 1908. Corkhill wanted a Democratic voice for Las Vegas. He promised the Review would be Democratic, "providing the Democrats behave themselves and 'come across' occasionally."

Las Vegas Mob

Few American cities are more mythic than Las Vegas, and no issue has been more central to the creation of those myths than organized crime. Thanks to entertaining if historically dubious films—The Godfather trilogy, Bugsy, and Casino stand out—the public developed an image of what the mob meant to Las Vegas.

John Cahlan

John Cahlan was an important part of Las Vegas journalism and life for more than half a century. Born in Reno in 1902, he was the grandson of men who had moved to Nevada before the Comstock Lode's discovery. Cahlan graduated from the University of Nevada and worked for the Nevada State Journal when its owner was longtime Nevada Democratic politician James Scrugham.

Golden Gate Corner

[VR Morph by Howard Goldbaum]

Watching this morphing animation, you might think downtown has changed a lot. So it has, but not entirely.

Fremont Street

Like the city it long has symbolized, Fremont Street was built and transformed within the span of a single century. Long known as "Glitter Gulch" for its bright lights, Fremont Street is the heart of downtown Las Vegas and, next to the Strip, the second most recognizable street in southern Nevada. It also is central to an effort to redevelop downtown; a necessity arising from the Strip's overwhelming success and the decline that afflicts most of America's older urban areas.

Florence Lee Jones Cahlan

In a town and an era in which women often were second-class citizens, Florence Lee Jones was a true Las Vegas leader and pioneer. Born in 1910, Jones was raised in Missouri where she earned a journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1933. She soon moved to southern Nevada to join her family, including brothers Cliff and Herb Jones, who worked on Hoover Dam and went on to lengthy political and legal careers.

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