The industrial heritage attraction known as AutoWorld, which opened in downtown Flint in July 1984, was intended to lure businesses and tourists to a struggling city. Yet just six months after opening, AutoWorld closed. This essay explores AutoWorld’s creation, its exhibits, and why audiences rejected it. I argue that this “half museum” and “half theme park” prioritized the auto industry’s agenda and white suburbanites over the needs of Flint residents. In doing so, I trace the connections between AutoWorld and the Flint Water Crisis, the origins of which are partially rooted in the subsidization of the auto industry’s expansion to the Flint suburbs. Because of misguided planning initiatives like AutoWorld, as well as the criminal enabling of the water crisis, the foundation of trust between Flint residents and those who operate the city’s institutions has been severely weakened.

California’s Franciscan missions were grounded in Indigenous homelands that to this day remain largely undertheorized and trivialized by scholarly and popular understandings of missions as inescapable fortresses of confinement. Narratives that position California’s missions as places of Indigenous imprisonment endure but they are at odds with a growing body of archaeological and documentary evidence demonstrating the persistence of Native lives, activities, and decision-making taking place within and beyond the walls of missions. We argue that interpretations of the missions in scholarly and popular conversation must make Indigenous persistence and resilient relationships to meaningful landscapes the cardinal priorities, not secondary attributes, in the study of Indigenous responses to colonization.

This article examines the potential use of dinosaur parks to reassess the relationship between humans and the environment. These sites have been developed across Europe and the United States over the course of the last century and have been neglected as sites of public history and environmental heritage. Within the guided trails where visitors interact with model or animatronic re-creations of animals that were extinct millions of years ago, a process of transformation takes place as individuals are required to rethink humanity’s place in the vast timescale of the Earth’s history and the fate of our own species in the context of climate change. Methods of affective engagement within the dinosaur parks serve as a tool to understand how natural history can be presented to the wider public as a means of changing attitudes and ideals. As we enter into the Anthropocene and we face environmental threats caused by human activity, it is the confrontation with the dinosaurs that can alter our present and our future on the planet.

Regardless of their interest in historic architecture, Americans often dismiss Modern architecture for being too boring, ugly, or recent to be worthy of preservation. Using the author’s advocacy experience in Columbia, South Carolina, as a case study, this article offers strategies for those looking to advocate and educate for Modern buildings constructed outside of major American cities between 1945 and 1975. The essay introduces the historical context for local Modern architecture, dissects its most common derisions, and suggests ways to convince skeptics to move past their assumptions.