In The News: Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies
On the evening of October 5, 1969, Gerald Davis stepped out of his house in West Las Vegas to fix his mother’s car and noticed police officers had pulled over a taxicab nearby. Known by residents as the “Westside,” this Black-majority area is located west of downtown, literally divided by the railroad tracks running through the city. Patrol vehicles were a familiar sight on the Westside, though younger residents claimed the police seemed less interested in civil service and more prone to brutality and intimidation.
One small school that opened 150 years ago and served primarily African Americans had a big impact on how teachers are educated even now in South Carolina. An exhibit at the University of South Carolina’s College of Education is celebrating the State Normal School, which was founded in 1873 and lasted three years. The display, at the Museum of Education, describes how the school became the foundation for teacher education and training in the state’s public schools.
These founders know their companies can make investors and social media platforms squirm. They’re finding ways to succeed, regardless. Anna Lee remembers walking into rooms full of male investors with a prototype of her startup’s smart vibrator in hand. It might as well have been a slithering snake.
It used to be a Las Vegas hot tip: go off the Strip to Chinatown for the city’s best food. Now there is not just one Chinatown in Nevada’s biggest metropolis but two, and a variety of Asian cuisines can be found across the city.
Every year, the U.S. Open Tennis Championships sparks a frenzy that goes beyond its sport. We tune into matches, watch the stands closely, and get inspired to sign up for tennis lessons—even if we've never swung a racket before. And it's not just us.
It used to be a Las Vegas hot tip: Go off the Strip to Chinatown for the city’s best food. Now there’s not just one Chinatown in Nevada’s biggest metropolis, but two. And the prevailing wisdom counsels late night oxtail soup at the California Hotel, an off-Strip spot catering to Hawaiians, who are so populous in the city that they call it the Ninth Island. Or a sushi roll called the “Japanese Lasagna,” Korean corn dogs and affordable izakayas in the city’s more suburban Chinatown area in Spring Valley.
One-on-one interview with Tyler D. Parry, Associate Professor of African American Studies, UNLV.
Harvard's Schlesinger Library didn’t set out to be a repository of 1980s pornographic history. It all started with the death of the feminist pornographer Candida Royalle. In 2015, the library’s then-director, Jane Kamensky, spotted Royalle’s obituary in The New York Times, which described her work as “female-oriented, sensuously explicit cinema as opposed to formulaic hard-core pornographic films that she said degraded women for the pleasure of men.”
On June 17, 2021, Juneteenth became a federal holiday in America. But in many pockets of the country it has been celebrated since long before then. Juneteenth, a portmanteau for June and nineteenth, began on that date in Galveston, Texas in 1865 when General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3.
As graduation ceremonies occur across the country, you might notice more decorated attire in Nevada. This is the first spring graduation since Nevada passed a law allowing students to decorate their grad caps and robes with religious or cultural regalia. Despite the law, earlier this month at Eldorado High School, a student was told she couldn’t wear a stole honoring her family’s heritage. Ultimately, the student was allowed to wear her stole, but this shows how the practice can be controversial. Today, we revisit a conversation with Dr. Sheila Bock, a folklorist at UNLV. She tells co-host Dayvid Figler how grad garb became so contentious and what happens when students use robes and mortarboards as a form of expression.
The filmmakers behind Love Lies Bleeding (director Rose Glass and her co-writer Weronika Tofilska) are, as Glass describes “obviously … both film nerds”.
Storytelling is the centerpiece of good entertainment, and our city has a lot of stories to tell. Las Vegas has been long obsessed with being ahead of the curve in all things entertainment, food and gaming. But with a reputation for building up new resorts as fast as it tears them down, Las Vegas is a city in constant flux. Often, important stories of our past are simply forgotten.