This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

Conventional accounts of missionary and settler colonialism in California have overemphasized the loss experienced by Native Americans. For indigenous Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people of the San Francisco Bay Area, a story of loss contrasts sharply with their casino—a symbol of prosperity—established in 2013. Each narrative is anchored to highly visible places that commemorate either loss or success. These places, examined here using two case studies, also conceal an important “heritage in-between”—that is, the critical time period, spaces, and things that reflect native resilience and transformation—that might serve to better contextualize both narrative projects.

Taken by a host of talented photographers, the Farm Security Administration photographs have become the defining visual imagery of the Great Depression. Familiar, beautifully composed, and free from reproduction copyright, these photographs have become an essential tool for interpreting a number of facets of the 1930s, especially that of poverty. As useful as the images are, the nature of their creation and the embedded messages regarding hardship mean that they are not as universal as is sometimes presumed. This article examines how the images facilitate interpretation of Great Depression history, particularly that which pertains to the experience of poverty, and the repercussions and limitations of their use.