
Learning Las Vegas
Portrait of a Northern New Mexican Place
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers(Author)
Museum of New Mexico Press
Published on 1. January 2015
Book
Hardback
284 pages
978-0-89013-578-5 (ISBN)
Description
Las Vegas, New Mexico, is the subject and muse of this provocative case study of "place", exploring the history and geography but most centrally walking the town and landscape and meeting the people whose lives tell of the rich complexity of the location. To start with topography, Las Vegas translates as "The Meadows". The name refers to the series of spacious grasslands fanning out from the slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Range where the mountains form the western terminus of the Great Plains. This fine location allowed Las Vegas, situated as it was on the Santa Fe Trail and with the arrival of the railroad, to become New Mexico's handsomest, most prosperous town. Throughout the opulent years from 1821 through the first decades of the twentieth century, merchants and businessmen amassed considerable wealth in grain and lumber from Mora and San Miguel counties, along with wool, hides, and metals from the Pecos and Mesilla valleys. The region's decline was spelled out by the rerouting of the railway along with changes in manufacturing. Today's Las Vegas is a proud but fading shadow of its former self, captured in human terms, in families and memories, and still in the dreams of its people. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, an accomplished cultural historian and photographer, includes portraits of some sixty residents interviewed extensively for the project and dozens of photographs detailing the town's architecture, public spaces, and natural features. To comprehend the layout of Las Vegas and study its architecture, Rogers walked its streets, exploring the outlying villages and ranches with traces of the Santa Fe Trail at Fort Union and elsewhere. To visualize its past, she delved deeply in archives and histories. To feel the pulse of the present, Rogers interviewed Las Vegans representing different cultural backgrounds, ages, and walks of life and immersed herself in local events and social gatherings. The result is an authentic portrait of a unique cultural place.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New Mexico
United States
Dimensions
Height: 262 mm
Width: 237 mm
Thickness: 31 mm
Weight
1683 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-89013-578-5 (9780890135785)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is a landscape preservationist and cultural historian and president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. She is the author of numerous publications including Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History, Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries, and Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design.