Pete Daniel is well known to many public historians as the first practicing museum professional to serve as president of the Organization of American Historians (2008–9; he also had been the first curator to serve in the same role for the Southern Historical Association, in 2005-6). By that time Daniel had spent more than twenty-five years as a curator at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), and so his election signaled for many a real sense of public history’s “arrival.” 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 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

Curating the American Past is also a work of labor history—an account of tensions between bosses and workers, contexts...

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