Wednesday Evening Speaker

Michael Green

The City The Mob (Sort Of) Built, The Mob Museum The City Built

A look at organized crime in Las Vegas, and the creation of The Mob Museum as a place to explain and attack it, by a Las Vegan who will also tell you about his brushes with the mob.

Bio

Michael Green is an associate professor of history in University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ (UNLV) Department of History. He earned his BA and MA at UNLV and his PhD at Columbia University. He teaches history courses on nineteenth-century America and on Nevada and Las Vegas for the history department and the Honors College.

His books on the Civil War era are Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party during the Civil War (Fordham University Press, 2004), Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War (ABC-CLIO, 2010), and Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011). His works on Nevada include Las Vegas: A Centennial History (with Eugene Moehring, University of Nevada Press, 2005); Nevada: A Journey of Discovery, a middle school textbook (Gibbs-Smith, 2004); and the oral history of a longtime Nevada attorney and politician, A Liberal Conscience: Ralph Denton, Nevadan (University of Nevada Oral History Program, 2001). The University of Nevada Press published his college-level textbook Nevada: A History of the Silver State in 2015.

Green is now working on several projects. He is writing a history of the Great Basin in the twentieth century for the University of Arizona Press and a history of organized crime in the twentieth century for Rowman & Littlefield. He also is editing A Companion to Abraham Lincoln as part of the Wiley-Blackwell series of historiography volumes.

He edits the Wilbur S. Shepperson Series on Nevada History for the University of Nevada Press and is a member of the editorial board for the press. He is a member of the board of directors for The Mob Museum. He is the director of Preserve Nevada and serves as executive director of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.

Green is also active in writing and speaking in the community. He writes “Nevada Yesterdays” for Nevada Humanities and KNPR, and “Inside the Beltway” for a newsletter, Nevada’s Washington Watch. He lives in Las Vegas, but not in Las Vegas (and he can explain why), with his wife, Deborah Young, former director of scholarship and tribute giving at UNLV, in a home owned by their two cats.

Convention Talk

Thursday, March 26

Session I
7:00–7:45 p.m.