Urban gambling, linked to poverty, crime and corruption, was once considered a blight on US cities. Gambling then followed the exodus of Americans into the suburbs after World War II and now, at the beginning of the 21st century, most Americans live within a four-hour drive of a casino. What explains the success of places like Las Vegas? The self-contained casino resort removes gambling and its social problems from cities and provides Americans with the comfort of gambling in a setting matched to their suburban lifestyle. In a detailed look at the growth of the earliest casino resorts to the "pleasure palaces" and riverboat casinos of today, "Suburban Xanadu" locates the rise of the casino resort in suburbanization and the significance of this development for today.
I love how "writer, historian" is in quotes next to my name. I really am one of each--I've got a Ph.D. in US History from UCLA and I've written three books so far. Most of my research and writing deals with gambling.
I first got interested in gambling as a kid growing up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the 1970s. Some of my earliest memories are of the classic hotels of the city being imploded to make way for modern casinos with hotel towers that were uniformly ugly. Despite this early evidence of that, perhaps, history might not have the strongest hold over people, I decided to major in it as an undergrad, along with anthropology. When it came time to go to grad school, I chose history over anthropology, though I can't recall as I'm writing this exactly why I made that decision.
In grad school I was preparing myself for the life of a college history professor when a small exercise called the dissertation stepped in my way. I would have to choose something to write a book-length historical study on, and it had to be something that would contribute in some way to the literature.
That's when I remembered the questions I'd had about casinos as a kid: Why did they need to blow up those beautiful old buildings to build new ones that didn't look nearly as nice? If they just wanted to gamble, why didn't they just let people gamble wherever they wanted? With a few questions like that, I was on my way to writing a dissertation that got me researching casinos.
From there, I haven't looked back, except for the year that I spent after I got my degree working in casino surveillance in Atlantic City's Trump Taj Mahal casino. I'd worked at the Taj earlier in security,and spending some time in surveillance gave me an appreciation for just how complex casinos are, and it kindled an interest in a whole other set of questions.
Since arriving at UNLV back in 2001, I've been running the Center for Gaming Research, which has let me look at some very interesting areas of gambling and Las Vegas history.
My website has a ton of info about my writing, professional, and creative work. So feel free to check it out at www.dgschwartz.com.
As far as the writing goes, I'm hard at work on my fourth book, which is in the editing stages. I write biweekly columns in the Las Vegas Business Press and Vegas Seven, and often write feature and smaller pieces for Vegas Seven as well.
