Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
Nevada is steeped in historic buildings — from the C. Clifton Young Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Reno, to weathered saloons scattered across the state’s former frontier, to the midcentury modern houses of Las Vegas’ Paradise Palms neighborhood.
Analiesa “Annie” Delgado fell in love with the stories those historic places tell.
Originally from California, Delgado moved to Las Vegas and is now in her sixth year as a doctoral candidate in history at UNLV. Her first brush with historic preservation came at Walking Box Ranch near Searchlight — the former property of 1920s silent film star Clara Bow and her actor husband, Rex Bell, who would later serve as Nevada’s lieutenant governor from 1955 to 1962.
Since enrolling at UNLV, Delgado has worked with the Nevada Preservation Foundation doing events at the Huntridge Theater and in downtown near the Mob Museum through the organization’s annual Home + History Las Vegas festival.
Delgado’s participation has helped build the groundwork for a budding partnership between the preservation foundation and UNLV’s Reid Public History Institute to cultivate more preservationists in the state.
“Las Vegas has a reputation for tearing down its history, but locals hold that history literally in themselves, and so, that’s kind of where I was like, ‘OK, I want to stay here and I want to do work here with the local history,’ ” Delgado said. “I think that this is a really, really important partnership, and I think it’s going to give our students a lot of opportunities to be able to grow as historians — as public historians — and just as people who are living in Las Vegas.”
Paige Figanbaum, executive director of the Nevada Preservation Foundation, worked with the organization while earning her doctorate in history at UNLV. The experience proved so valuable that it became her mission to develop a program within the preservation foundation where UNLV history majors could acquire the same hands-on skills outside the classroom.
The preservation foundation is a nonprofit membership organization based in Las Vegas that preserves historic sites within the state, educates communities on their cultural legacies and advocates for the preservation of historic buildings and places across Nevada.
The foundation has worked with UNLV’s history professors and students for years, so the partnership was a given after so many years of collaboration, said Deirdre Clemente, associate director of the Reid Public History Institute.
This developing partnership between the Reid Public History Institute and preservation foundation offers opportunities for UNLV students wanting jobs in history.
Pursuing a history degree can lead to various roles for students, from becoming a professor or writing a book to working in museums or advocating for historic landmarks.
The preservation foundation plans to establish a dedicated Reid Institute section within its programming that offers students hands-on experiences in which they can be mentored by professionals, apply the skills learned in class, build relationships with the community and discover what career path they’d like to take with their degree.
“We are trying to create more preservationists locally. Obviously, the classroom is very important … but you cannot be a public historian without working with community members,” Figanbaum said. “The purpose of this partnership is, we’re just trying to give (students) the most experience so they can figure out what they like (and) what they don’t like, but also really seeing the full circle of what public history is.”
Historic preservation in Nevada looks vastly different than it does in regions like the East Coast, where much of the work is driven by well-funded academic and historic institutions, Clemente said.
Nevada’s dry climate and thousands of acres of federally owned land are unique on their own, but Las Vegas specifically has built a reputation for reinventing itself, constantly replacing the old to put up something new.
Some examples: the teardown of the Tropicana in 2024 to make way for the A’s baseball stadium, the 2007 Stardust implosion that eventually made way for Resorts World Las Vegas, and the 1993-94 demolition of the Dunes that paved the way for the Bellagio’s construction.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a treasure trove of historical locations in just Southern Nevada alone.
There are nearly 50 places in Clark County listed on the Nevada State Register of Historic Places, and 67 on the National Register of Historic Places, according to the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office.
Some of those spots include the Hoover Dam, the former Moulin Rouge Hotel in Las Vegas’ Historic Westside, the Huntridge Theater downtown and Las Vegas Academy of the Arts — the original Las Vegas High School— on South Seventh Street in the Founders District downtown.
State and federal recognition isn’t the only way history survives — countless everyday people preserve local sites and artifacts simply because they love doing it.
Figanbaum and Clemente said Southern Nevada offered plenty of opportunities for historic preservation — from documenting families who have lived in the region for generations to adapting older buildings for modern use.
Nevada needs more trained preservationists to help with this work, and that’s where this Nevada Preservation Foundation and UNLV collaboration become important.
The preservation foundation stages events annually throughout Nevada to help foster interest in state history within the community.
One of its biggest events is the annual Home + History Las Vegas festival, a weekend of various historical tours and educational events that celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2025. It’s the valley’s largest yearly heritage festival and features more than 40 experiences and special events, often staffed by volunteers and history experts.
Home + History Las Vegas 2026 will be April 16-19.
Students will work as volunteers for the festival, helping organize tours, talks and other educational events.
In the future, the preservation organization is looking at creating roles in which students can shadow members of the preservation foundation throughout the year or even organize their own educational event with support from the nonprofit, Figanbaum said. They don’t want to limit how involved students can be.
The Nevada Preservation Foundation and UNLV Reid Public History Institute are still discussing how many students will be involved and further activities for students.
The point: to allow students to explore and get as much work experience as they can.
“The partnership was a really natural fit, and the students are super excited about it. They’re willing to show up and do work, and it’s just giving them the opportunity to do that, and that’s a really unique aspect of the partnership,” Clemente said. “That kind of stuff really gets students to see the range of applications you can do with a history degree.
“Everybody’s mom says, ‘History degree? What are you going to do with a history degree?’ Well, what can’t you do with a history degree?” she said.
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