Dr. Larry Gragg, is a professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology where he teaches the History of Las Vegas and American Civilization courses. He has also been a department chair of the history and political science department since 2003 and is an active, award-winning writer and scholar. Larry is the author of “Bright Light City: Las Vegas in Popular Culture” which discusses the history of Vegas and how that history has been constructed and imagined through the concerted efforts of shrewd PR people. His book explores how Las Vegas came to be a desert ‘utopia’ for millions of visitors still drawn daily to the ‘allure of the forbidden’. His forthcoming book, Benjamin Bugsy Siegel: The Gangster, the Flamingo, and the Making of Modern Las Vegas, is due to be published in late 2014.
Dr. Eugene Moehring is professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from the City University of New York and his B.A. (1968) and M.A. (1970) in history from Queens College. A specialist in urban history, he teaches courses in business history, the U.S. since 1920, Nevada history, and the history of science.
In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, he has published six books: Public Works and the Patterns of Urban Real Estate Growth in Manhattan, 1835-1894; Resort City in the Sunbelt: Las Vegas, 1930-2000 ; Urbanism and Empire in the Far West, 1840-1890; A Las Vegas Centennial History with Michael Green; The University of Nevada, Las Vegas: A History, and most recently, Reno, Las Vegas, and the Strip: A Tale of Three Cities.
A professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Dr. Michael S. Green specializes in nineteenth-century politics and the American West. His works on the Civil War era include Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party during the Civil War (2004); Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War (2010); and Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (2011). His five books on Nevada include Las Vegas: A Centennial History (2005), with Eugene Moehring. He is on the advisory board and content committee of the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. (aka The Mob Museum.) He is writing a history of Nevada, editing “The Blackwell Companion to Abraham Lincoln,” and coediting “Ideas and Movements That Shaped America.”
Sue Kim Chung, author of “Las Vegas: Then and Now” published in 2002, is a native of Fresno, California. She studied European History at California State University, Fresno in l995. After earning her MLIS from the University of California, Los Angeles, she moved to Las Vegas to work as the manuscripts librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her primary duty is identification, selection and acquisition of archival collections that document the history and cultural of Las Vegas and the southern Nevada region.
