Nevada: The Wild Rise of Sin City with Sharon McMahon

The Preamble

Sharon McMahon

History, Education

4.9 • 15.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Sharon walks through the last two centuries of history in Las Vegas to uncover the making of America’s “Sin City.” The Las Vegas strip has not always been glitz and glamour and its history is marked by brushes with Spanish settlers, the mafia, wall street millionaires, the Mormon Church, and most of all, the U.S. government. Tracing back to the 1820s, Sharon explores how Las Vegas developed from illegal speakeasies during prohibition to modern mega-resorts that attract over 42 million visitors annually. Listen to learn how the Hoover Dam, the 18th amendment, and atomic bombs turned Las Vegas into the entertainment mecca we know and love today.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello my friends. I love today's episode. I love that you're here. One of the things I am
0:08.5	super curious about or I should say I was super curious about is how did Las Vegas get to be Las Vegas?
0:17.6	Who decided that? I wanted to know. So I did a deep dive and I have the scoop for you.
0:24.5	So let's dive in.
0:26.5	I'm Sharon McMahon.
0:28.1	And welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.
0:33.0	Las Vegas was first explored by the Spanish in the
0:38.0	1820s. Of course, indigenous groups had lived there for
0:42.0	thousands of years, but the Spanish begin to explore
0:46.5	the region that is now Las Vegas in the 1820s.
0:51.5	One of the reasons it was of interest is that there were springs there, water springs,
0:57.6	water trapped underground and it sort of sporadically rose to the surface and formed an oasis and had all of this desert
1:05.5	plant life.
1:06.9	And so the Spanish named the region Las Vegas because it means the meadows in Spanish that's how it got its name and had vegetation in what was otherwise a very dusty desert in the
1:22.0	1850s, Mormon pioneers began to settle that region. Today, of course, we refer to people who belong to the Church of Latter-day Saints as people who are
1:37.0	part of the LDS faith at the time they were called Mormon pioneers.
1:40.8	They eventually decided this is not the place that we are going to settle
1:46.3	permanently at least for the time being but it was one of the earlier European groups that settled in that region.
1:56.0	So in 1864 they added Nevada to the Union.
2:01.0	It became the 36th state of the union of course during that time
2:04.2	frame the United States was all about consolidating his power and this was
2:09.3	during the time of the Civil War they wanted to strengthen the Union, meaning the Union of free states.
	...

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