By Peter Michel and Aaron Mayes
Before gaming, before hotels, before the tourists came, the Las Vegas valley of the 1800s was home to Native American Indians, explorers, miners, ranchers, and settlers heading to California, who wandered, set down, picked up, and mostly moved on. When the San Pedro, Salt Lake, and Los Angeles Railroad decided to use the local springs on the old Stewart Ranch to water its locomotives, and, almost as an afterthought in 1905, laid out a small townsite around its depot and train yards, the latest Nevada boom town suddenly appeared. This eruption of a new town in the desert is vividly captured throughout the early family photo albums now housed at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, (UNLV) Libraries Special Collections & Archives.

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By Amy Pason
Over the holidays, my family likes to play board games. This year, we played Seven Wonders where the objective is to build a civilization strategizing resource and building cards. Sometimes your strategy might be to build marketplaces so you profit from other players buying resources. Sometimes it is more advantageous to develop the arts. While other times, you might need to go on the offense to gain armies if your opponents decide to take a defense strategy (for the record, I was able to best my parents’ points gained in battle by focusing on points gained by my science and education buildings). 

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We wish you a joyous holiday season and look forward to sharing with you all the humanities have to offer from Reno to Las Vegas and every place in between. 

Happy Holidays from Nevada Humanities!

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By The Holland Project
The Holland Project and KWNK 97.7FM, along with Nevada Humanities, have collaborated to bring you a retrospective on the 2019 Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl, “Unabridged.” Bask in the afterglow, and plan ahead to another sunny September day for the 2020 Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl.

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By Kristen Simmons
I didn’t know I wanted to be an author until my senior year in high school. It was in my English class at McQueen High in Reno, Nevada, when Mr. Shields read my essay on A Tale of Two Cities aloud to the class. I was embarrassed—I mean, stoplight red, quaking in my seat, really hoping my crush in the back row wasn’t listening, embarrassed. Those minutes lasted a lifetime, and when Mr. Shields was finally finished, he placed the paper on my desk, and said, “You’ve really got something.”

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By Staff of Nevada Humanities
Wishing you and yours a most Happy Thanksgiving Day! Celebrate, give thanks, and seek out the humanities in the world around you.

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By Staff of Nevada Humanities
Have you ever stopped to think about the many ways in which the humanities touch your life? The humanities are all around you. The humanities are the basic elements that make us human, our capacity for reflection, our creativity, and our diverse cultures and identities.

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By Christina Barr
Every year humanities council board members and staff from councils in each state around the nation gather together for the National Humanities Conference where we share program ideas, reinforce best practices, and connect with colleagues. This conference has become a critical forum for sharing our work and bringing new knowledge and programs to Nevada.

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By Ellie Lakatos
This letter is one of the 2019 “Letters About Literature” competition winners for the state of Nevada.

Dear Maya Angelou, 
I was never a ‘poem’ person. Analyzing or even reading poems seemed un-entertaining to me. On the other hand, I enjoyed and preferred to write prose. Poetry never stuck with me. To me, finding the deeper meanings in poems was a waste of time. That was true until one drama class in my first year of middle school, 6th grade. In beginning drama, I was nervous about what others would think of me. Was I cool in their eyes? Or was I lame? 

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By Deirdre Clemente
What can you do with $1,000?
I have an ex-boyfriend who spent $1,000 on a pair of rollerblades that he used two times before he gave them the Goodwill. My cousin paid $1,000 for a full-bred dog, who ate the toes out of all her socks. People spend $1,000 on bottles of champagne on the Vegas strip every single night. Others pay $1,000 for a psychic reading or baseball card or belt from Gucci. In the grand scheme of American life, it’s not a lot of money.

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By Keith A. Brantley

   Valley times like Death Valley Days. 

We cannot count the ways

Our valley has changed.

We are estranged

from our less than humble beginnings.

Beginning with mob ties,

Our valley lies

Upon layers of mortar and bone.

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By Joan Robinson

As long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with ruins. Maybe it started with that picture of my father as a college boy standing shirtless in the Coliseum, thumb pointing downward with the ruthless arrogance of a petulant Caesar. Or maybe it started with our family’s monthly visits to Detroit, already crumbling to ruin in the 1970s. Whatever started it, the Mojave Desert has offered me a wealth of atmospheric, tumble-down facades to explore from Rhyolite to Goldfield, to Nelson’s Techatticup Mine, and then just over the border to the Liberty Bell Arc. There are ghost towns and abandoned mines aplenty to explore.

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By Scott Dickensheets and Geoff Schumacher
On October 17, 2019, Nevada Humanities and Huntington Press will release A Change Is Gonna Come: Reinvention in the City of Second Chances with a reception beginning at 6 pm and author readings at 7pm at the Clark County Library in Las Vegas. This anthology of essays, stories, and poems by Las Vegas writers is the tenth volume of Las Vegas Writes, an annual project of the Las Vegas Book Festival that highlights the community’s deep and sustaining literary talent pool and also program of Nevada Humanities.

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By Tony Manfredi and Christina Barr
When President Johnson signed the National Arts and Humanities Act into law in 1965, no one envisioned the extent to which the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) would become embedded in our lives.

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By D.K. Sole

Aware that the city where we live is often portrayed as a glossy, one-dimensional place, we looked into the museum collection for work that suggested the opposite—roughness, surprise, and contrast. Dry Wit: Artworks from the Collection of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art began to evolve.

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By Lydia Huerta

The current political moment has made the physical border between the US and Mexico a protagonist with a life all of its own. In some cases, the news of the militarization, the violence, the migrant detention camps, the family separations, and the most recent targeted shooting of Mexicans in El Paso seem to make the border into a scene from a forthcoming apocalypse.

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