Gaming confronts historians with an intriguing challenge. Since the beginning of recorded history, people have wagered on the outcome of games of chance. Yet, playing those games could mean very different things for all involved. Gaming was always embedded in specific historical contexts that alter the playing experience.

The advent of casinos — dedicated and commercialized places of gaming in the 19th Century — profoundly changed age-old and location-specific traditions of wagering. Casinos removed gaming from a private sphere of small circles of people and enabled a new industry to take shape.

Although the locations for casinos could be found in unique places across the globe, modern gaming became more and more uniform as the industry developed and standardized during the 20th Century. Las Vegas, however, is special. It For the millions of people coming to Las Vegas, gaming is an essential part of what they expect to witness and experience. Furthermore, they attribute a special quality to gaming here — a supposed unique consumption of the total experience; Las Vegas has always been viewed as offering more than just games. And its influential casinos achieved the power to define how games of chance were to be experienced for large parts of the American public.

They cultivated spaces, practices, and business models to set the city apart from other locations. Elsewhere gambling appeared to be more deviant, or inadequate when compared to Las Vegas. The shift from Old West images to a heavily themed and glamorous experience was one key element in this development. Others included highly refined safety procedures within the casinos as well as a marketing focus to contextualize gaming in a broader framework of leisure and tourism.

Although games of chance were played here the same way as anywhere else — with cards and dice, roulette wheels and slot machines — the specific embeddedness transformed the way people experienced them. This is what sets Las Vegas apart from the traditional “spas” in my native country of Germany or more recent gaming cities such as Atlantic City, New Jersey, or Macao, China. While all these cities are economically tightly connected to gambling and influenced by it, Las Vegas achieved the status of a specific consumption experiences.

How this happened in an historical perspective is worth a closer investigation — and one that could only be found in Las Vegas itself. Using the collections that the UNLV Libraries Special Collections maintains on  casinos like The Sands, the Dunes, the Flamingo Hilton, the Stardust and people involved with them Claudine Williams, Charles Hirsch and others, I am trying to reconstruct how gaming in Las Vegas was infused with the special meaning it has today. Looking at business strategies, architectural plans, and accounts of visitors, can tell the tale of how Las Vegas became synonymous with an exciting, hedonistic, yet safe gaming experience can be traced back to the mid-20th century.

About the Eadington Fellows

The UNLV University Libraries Center for Gaming Research annually awards fellowships to faculty and graduate researchers from around the world actively studying gaming and gambling. The fellows spend between two and five weeks conducting research at the University Libraries and present their findings through a colloquium series as well as their own scholarship.