Something for Your Money: A History of Las Vegas Casinos

Las Vegas has been a gambling town since its 1905 founding. Its gambling halls, casino hotels, and resorts made it first a local curiosity, then a national obsession, and finally a global destination. The modern American casino resort was born on a lonely stretch of road that, within a decade, would become known as the Las Vegas Strip. This was a place where America could cut loose, enjoying pleasures denied at home. As visitors flocked to Las Vegas, casinos became a business and then an industry. Today, with casino gambling widely proliferated, Las Vegas still is the pinnacle of American gambling, be it on slot machines, blackjack, sports betting, or poker.

This book shares stories about how Las Vegas became—and stayed—America's gambling capital, focusing on the casinos that made it famous and the hustlers, gangsters, number-crunchers, and dreamers who made them. Those who fought against Las Vegas show up as well: the senator whose campaign against legal gambling magnificently backfired, or the pair of muckrakers who made Las Vegas seem more tantalizing than ever before—and gave the town its defining myth.

The dusty gambling halls of the city's earliest years seem to have little in common with the megaresorts that line Las Vegas Boulevard today, but they share an ethos summed up by pioneer gambler Jim McIntosh: "Something for your money." It's a vague promise that leaves everything to the imagination—perfect for a town that always thought big. From his Arizona Club to the sawdust joints of 1930s Fremont Street, from the birth of the Strip with the El Rancho Vegas to the fabulous, fated Flamingo, all the way through the glory years of the Sands and the imperial drama of Caesars Palace, casinos always offered something that couldn't be found elsewhere. Since the advent of corporate ownership in the 1970s, the story has gotten more interesting as casinos weathered three recessions and a pandemic, emerging stronger than ever.

On Fremont Street, along the Strip, in neighborhoods around the valley, casinos transformed Las Vegas. Something for Your Money shows how this very American business blossomed in its desert oasis.