One of the most culturally significant roads in the world, U.S. Highway 66 (commonly referred to as Route 66) has connected Chicago and Los Angeles since 1926. In order to explore what heritage themes Route 66 sites convey to tourists, we assessed the information presented to visitors at nearly four‐dozen museums and interpretive sites astride the road using the qualitative software Nvivo 10. Five themes dominate interpretation. Route 66 thematically flows east to west with Chicago as the beginning and Los Angeles as the end of the road. Mobility and personal freedom of movement via the automobile are encapsulated in the history of the road. In addition, Route 66 highlights nostalgia for the 1950s with classic American automobiles, music of the era, and neon lights representing this golden age of the highway. Economic decline, and often the economic continuity of communities, is frequently found in interpretive materials. Finally, Route 66 museums are repositories of community memory as oral histories preserve the narratives of individuals and families who owned businesses on and lived near the road for multiple decades. We conclude with several observations about interpretative themes that are overlooked as well as regional differences in the geography of memory along Route 66.

New-build development has become associated with the phase of gentrification that has taken shape since the mid-1990s. This article examines the gentrification of Deep Deuce, a historically black neighborhood in Oklahoma City. An analysis of property sales identifies the major external agents involved and leads to a discussion of the area's racial turnover. Considering the relational aspects of place, specifically how the identity of Deep Deuce has been constructed in relation to the nearby area of Bricktown, provides new insights on the nature of changes affecting this neighborhood. Supplementing this with an examination of resistance to the gentrification of Deep Deuce shows how city neighborhoods can come to be defined by limited understandings of place, and how historic preservation efforts can generate symbolic capital and facilitate cultural appropriation. This article also contributes to the study of gentrification in smaller metropolitan areas.

This article seeks to bridge the gap in scholarship between entrepreneurial urbanism and the understanding of place image as presented through tourist guidebooks. Tourist guidebooks have long been used to sell regions and attractions to prospective tourists. Narratives in these guides often shift to reflect the changing economics, politics, and culture of a region or city. More recently, the rise of entrepreneurial urbanism has been one of those factors that have impacted tourist guidebooks. The (re)construction of a place image through entrepreneurial policies results in the promotion of a select package of facilities or highlighting specific attributes associated with that place. This article illustrates how entrepreneurial urban projects and policies can directly shape a city's tourist promotions. I use Oklahoma City as a case study to explore these impacts and examine more than 30 years of tourist guidebooks to understand the changing narratives of the city in light of entrepreneurial urban policies. More specifically, I show that Oklahoma City officials shifted tourist narratives from overt Old West constructs to constructs rooted in cosmopolitanism in light of entrepreneurial agendas, like the Metropolitan Area Projects and business improvement districts.

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