Curating the American Past

About

In Curating the American Past, Pete Daniel reveals 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.

Author

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.

Praise

“In Curating the American Past, Pete Daniel narrates his passage from the tobacco fields of North Carolina to the presidencies of leading historical organizations by way of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where he served as a curator for nearly three decades. His account is a must-read for public historians and every serious student of the rich, contested, and ever-unfolding American experience that Daniel’s lifework explores so insightfully and compassionately.”
—Joseph P. Reidy, author of Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery

“Pete Daniel is one of a kind, writing simultaneously as a veteran curator and a distinguished American historian. His lively memoir offers a sobering warning to the museum world and to all who study, teach, or care about American history.”
—Barbara J. Fields, Columbia University

“Reading Curating the American Past is like sitting down for a long and laugh-filled conversation illuminating Daniel’s love and respect for the people of the rural South, dedication to honest historical scholarship, and contempt for craven administrators who repeatedly proved only too eager to sell the soul of an institution to wealthy donors.”
—Bruce J. Hunt, University of Texas

“Pete Daniel’s candid memoir revealing donor intrusion, feckless administrators, and bureaucratic inertia should alert everyone concerned about the public presentation of American history.”
—Donald A. Ritchie, Senate historian emeritus and author of Doing Oral History

Reviews

“As is well known, Pete is an outstanding storyteller, and this book is no exception. Chronicling his professional career, the book moves from colleges to archives to farms to racetracks, as Pete’s collecting and researching life unfolds…. The book also offers a serious commentary on the long-standing question of how historians can make their work relevant to the general public. For scholars at universities, the answers to this question often revolve around producing more public-facing scholarship and the challenges of evaluating such work for promotion and tenure. For Pete and other scholars in the museum field, reaching the public is easy. More difficult are the shackles placed on curators by administrators and donors who often desire simple, triumphant narratives, as opposed to the complicated, messy histories that reflect all nations’ pasts. Pete’s memoir details his indefatigable efforts to collect the histories of average Americans and to tell difficult stories that would truly educate visitors to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He also narrates the growing opposition he unfortunately encountered from inept administrators and the uber-wealthy seeking to brand exhibits, not only with their names, but also with their limited and parochial understanding of American history.”
—Claire Strom, Journal of Southern History, Book Notes, November 2022

“An award-winning historian of the rural south, Daniel has also authored several monographs on a wide range of subjects rooted in southern, labor, and agricultural history, including his powerful study Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Curating the American Past is also a work of labor history—an account of tensions between bosses and workers, contexts shaping working conditions, and changing occupational culture—but this time the setting is not the cotton or tobacco fields of the US South, but rather the corridors and cubicles of the Smithsonian Institution. … At its best, the memoir reminds readers of the joys and challenges of stewarding the human relationships that lie at the heart of building and interpreting museum collections; the constant care and feeding required of collaborations large and small; the plain fun of fieldwork, and exhilaration of chasing important acquisitions; and the deep satisfaction that comes when curatorial visions find fruition, In the end, Daniel principally hopes to remind readers that ‘the Smithsonian’s reputation [rests] on its significant scholarship and thoughtful, well-researched exhibits’ (142); Curating the American Past offers one man’s view of factors that over three decades both supported and subverted those aims.
—Marla R. Miller, The Public Historian, May 2023

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