I've heard Las Vegas described as a secular pilgrimage center. Going to Las Vegas is almost a rite of passage for many Americans. It's the favored location of bachelor parties, 21st birthdays, and other major milestones where alcohol consumption and lack of inhibition are expected. How did this happen? I'm curious about the origins of casino gambling, etc. in the city, but also the history of how it came to occupy such a prominent place in wider American culture as the place we go to break social rules.
Three early (pre-mafia) factors that made Las Vegas distinctive:
the nationwide crackdown on gambling during Prohibition, which Nevada managed to resist. That by itself would make for an interesting thread, as they incurred a pretty big backlash from powerful political actors.
in the 1930s, the construction of the Boulder Dam (now the Hoover Dam) and the Desert Warfare Training Center, which flooded what was then a smallish town with many thousands of young, unattached men (dam workers and soldiers) with disposable income to waste.
Nevada had easy divorce laws. All you had to do was camp out for two weeks and a judge would rubber stamp it. And with Los Angeles being a 3 to 4 hour drive away, Hollywood movie star couples would come in from California, the men would cavort on dude ranches while the women would lounge poolside at the small resorts that existed at the time, and the entertainment press would go hog-wild at the (glamorous) scandal.
I should mention that Clark County (where Las Vegas is) was forced to get rid of legal prostitution during this time. The Army made them choose between that or gambling; they couldn't have their men being subjected to both. Which is why one must drive to Pahrump (which is in Nye County, also home to the Nevada Test Site) to go to a legal brothels, and why there is no prostitution in Las Vegas. (smirk)
This was the pre-mafia era.
I should note that up until the 50s and 60s when the whole mafia/rat pack era was in full swing, most the action was up in the Tahoe-Reno corridor. Northern California was more populated than Southern at the time, so there was more of an interstate market. (Today, half of Las Vegas' weekend traffic comes from Southern California. Bread and butter.) But given your question, what all was going on during the Prohibition and Depression years in Las Vegas set the stage for what was to come (the mafia era, and the corporate era that superseded it and continues today).
Here's a good book for the early history. I attended a lecture by the author once.
Resort City in the Sunbelt: Las Vegas 1930-2000” by Eugene P. Moehring.