There are many ways to better remember compelling sports stories and crucial American histories like Japanese American baseball in the incarceration camps, and we’ve moved through a number of them already this season. But there’s nothing quite like the game itself—and engaging with a handful of iconic baseball games and their multilayered contexts and connections can also help us think and talk about the limits and possibilities of doing this work, and why the effort matters so much in our own moment in any case.

Baseball is very much a team sport, but iconic individual players still stand out—not only for what they can contribute on the field, but also and especially for the symbolic stories and compelling histories they can help us remember. That was potently and inspiringly the case for Japanese American players in incarceration camps, from three brothers to a father and his two sons to a trio of Major League prospects. And it’s certainly been true across American sports history overall as well.

Two of America’s most prominent early 20th century photographers visited Manzanar, on distinct and equally fraught missions that nonetheless produced a number of striking images, including of baseball at the camp. Another of the era’s most talented photographers was incarcerated there, using a smuggled and homemade camera to document the camp’s community and resist its worst realities. All legacies we can trace through the art, photography, and activist journalism of both their historical moment and our own.