In The News: University Libraries

Have questions or want to learn more about the history of Las Vegas? There is no better place to start than the Special Collections and Archives Department at UNLV.

When you think of "Old Vegas," the icons that probably come to mind are names like Elvis, Sinatra and Wayne Newton. However, there were many Asian American and Pacific Islander performers then, too, who played an integral role in shaping entertainment on the Las Vegas Strip in the mid to late 1900s.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not yet released data from last month on its increased enforcement operation in the Las Vegas Valley, but a UNLV Immigration Clinic attorney doesn’t believe it was as successful as the agency thought it would be.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not yet released data from last month on its increased enforcement operation in the Las Vegas Valley, but a UNLV Immigration Clinic attorney doesn’t believe it was as successful as the agency thought it would be.
Las Vegas has always been the epitome of glitz and excess, but there was a time when it became the birthplace of the greatest entertainment shows inspired by the famous dancers of the Folies Bergère in Paris.
A group of University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) students have painstakingly preserved a photographer’s archive by digitizing it and making it available online to anyone. Six students worked on the project over the course of two to preserve the work of Clinton Wright, a press photographer who documented Black life in the Westside neighborhood of Las Vegas in the 1960s.

UNLV students are hard at work preserving the images and records of Las Vegas photographer Clinton Wright, whose decades of work shed light into African American life and experience in the 1960s and beyond.
Prominent Black leaders like Woodrow Wilson (not the U.S. president) had to fight tooth and nail to have access to the legislative process. Wilson was Nevada’s first Black legislator who moved to Las Vegas in 1966, at the height of segregation, according to an oral history from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

As Las Vegas continues to grapple with food insecurity, one area non-profit is hoping to tackle the issues and provide residents in food deserts with fresh produce.

Oral History Research Center Director Claytee White shares stories people have told her over the years about Las Vegas and explains the importance of recording these memories for historical record.

Charles Kellar was a middle-aged New York attorney with a family, an established law practice and a portfolio of investment properties. But when Thurgood Marshall, then the head of the NAACP’s legal division, asked him to go to Nevada, he went, according to Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV.

When Nevada Assemblyman Woodrow Wilson went into a Carson City bar where fellow legislators “did their politicking” in the 1960s, they told the owner they wouldn’t continue patronizing the bar if Wilson, who was Black, was there. The bar owner told Wilson about the incident, and he learned the legislators were the same ones who had tried to buy him drinks and make him feel welcome.