The University of Arkansas Press is proud to announce the forthcoming publication of Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History by Pete Daniel.
In Curating the American Past, Pete Daniel takes readers behind the Staff Only door at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to reveal how curators collect objects, plan exhibits, and bring alive the country’s complex and exciting history. In vivid detail, Daniel recounts the exhilaration of innovative research, the joys of collaboration, and the rewards of mentoring new generations of historians. In a career distinguished by prize-winning publications and pathbreaking exhibitions, Daniel also confronted the challenges of serving as a public historian tasked with protecting a definitive American museum from the erosion of scholarly standards. Curating the American Past offers a wealth of museum wisdom, illuminating the crucial role that dedicated historians and curators serve within our most important repositories of cultural memory.
A former curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and an award-winning historian of the American South, Pete Daniel was the first full-time public historian to serve as president of the Organization of American Historians. He co-curated Rock ’n’ Soul: Social Crossroads and Official Images: New Deal Photography, among several other major exhibitions. His books include Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s and Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights and Deep’n as it Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood
Curating the American Past will be available in February 2022.