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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Barber, Alicia. "Living It Up, Living It Down: Civic Reputation, Tourism, and Urban Development in Reno, Nevada," University of Texas at Austin, May 2003.
This dissertation examines the relationship between the civic reputation and the cultural landscape of Reno, Nevada from its founding in 1868 to the present. Drawing on a diverse array of materials including promotional literature, city directories, oral histories, periodicals, film, fiction, and architecture, I examine the formation of Reno’s national reputation as a divorce capital and gambling mecca in conjunction with the development in of its city center. Always accompanying the desire of various local business interests to capitalize on market demands for legal freedoms, vice, and titillation was the corresponding desire of other residents to overcome that reputation through assertions of the city’s respectability, livability, and normality. Accordingly, each side aspired to create, and to preserve, a landscape that reflected its vision of Reno. The relationship between Reno’s civic reputation and its cultural landscape has been clearly reciprocal, with the national reputation influencing the symbolic economy of the landscape, and that landscape in turn inspiring fluctuations in the city’s outward reputation for better and for worse. In examining Reno’s entire historical development, I am able to trace the continuities and controversies regarding the city’s architectural heritage, place promotion, tourist industry, and residential sense of place. In doing so, I connect nineteenth-century boosterism to late twentieth-century place marketing, considering the shifts in Reno’s reputation with respect to changing American cultural values, biases, and stereotypes about divorce, gambling and the American West itself.
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