sutton039

Michael S. Green Today thousands of Las Vegans and tourists will line up to go to a museum, thanks to Senator Estes Frank Costello testifying before the Kefauver Committee, 1951. Kefauver of Tennessee; a mayor who used to represent mobsters; and federal officials who proved more Las Vegan than Las Vegans. The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, known as the Mob Museum, opened in Las Vegas on February 14, 2012, on a carefully chosen date: the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In 1929, in Chicago, Al Capone’s hoodlums executed several members of the gangs led by Scarface’s rival, Bugs Moran. The museum has the wall, complete with bullet holes and bloodstains. Las Vegas seems like a logical place for this museum, since casino operators associated with the mob built and ran many of the resorts that dotted the Strip from the 1940s into the 1980s. Many continue to think it all began with Bugsy Siegel—or perhaps Warren Beatty—opening the Flamingo in 1946....

Randall Stephens The Response by Sir William Goscombe John. Unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1923. Ernest Hemingway didn't mince words.  The author of A Farewell to Arms claimed that World War I "was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied . So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought."  Seeing the ravages of war up close, he served with distinction as an ambulance driver in Italy .  Gertrude Stein coined the phrase "lost generation," which applied to Hemingway and other wayward souls like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. What accounts for the gap between Hemingway's tone and the gallant, heroic one of war memorials?  Did region have a role to play in war remembrance?  How do we make sense of the conflict now that the last veterans have passed away ? As we near the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I Don Yerxa has been conducting a s...