The digitization of entomological collections is a key area of modern science, ensuring the long-term preservation of specimens, open access to metadata, and integration into global bioinformatics systems. This article analyzes international experience in the digital transformation of entomological collections using the examples of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (USA) and the Natural History Museum, London (UK), where high-performance photography technologies, OCR, artificial intelligence, and Darwin Core standards are used for data structuring. The article examines the role of digital platforms and networks (GBIF, iDigBio, DiSSCo) in providing open access to collections for scientific, educational, and public purposes. The status of digitization of entomological collections in Ukraine is highlighted separately, in particular the activities of the State Museum of Natural History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (creation, populating the database, and maintaining the information retrieval system of the “Biodiversity of Ukraine” Data Center , digitization of the main collection of the State Museum of Natural History of the NASU, provision of scientific, methodological, and practical assistance in digitizing entomological collections of certain universities and natural history museums within the Nature Reserve Fund of Ukraine, and creation of virtual collections: taxonomic, author-based, reference, thematic, systematic, and institutional), the I. I. Shmalgauzen Institute of Zoology and university collections, including the newly established entomological collection of the V. Hnatiuk Ternopil National Pedagogical University (to date, 65 specimens of 24 species belonging to 21 genera, 15 families, and 7 orders have been digitized: Coleoptera, Dictyoptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, Neuroptera, Orthoptera) . The authors emphasize that the digitization of collections contributes to the conservation of biodiversity, the advancement of scientific research, education, and the popularization of knowledge about insects. The article’s conclusions highlight the need for coordination, funding, and international integration to further advance the digitization of entomological collections in Ukraine.

Natural history collections contain millions of microscope slides documenting global microscopic biodiversity, yet these materials remain largely undigitized and are vulnerable to deterioration and loss. Recent advances in slide scanner technology, originally developed for medical pathology, offer new opportunities for comprehensive digitization of slide-based collections. Here we present an optimized protocol for digitizing diverse microscope slide specimens, using the Hamamatsu NanoZoomer S20 slide scanner, developed while imaging slides at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. We provide specimen-specific recommendations for scanning parameters, including scan area, focal points, Z-stack configuration, and file management workflows. Scanning times range from 41 seconds for small invertebrates to 18 minutes for palynological samples, with final compressed file sizes of 0.15-28 GB. High-resolution images (0.23 μm/pixel) captured diagnostic morphological features across all specimen types, including pollen, diatoms, radiolarians, plant and fungi tissues, and invertebrates. Using this method, we estimated that just the NMNH's paleo-palynology slide collection contains approximately 4.3 billion individual specimens, 30 times more than the current estimated size of the entire NMNH collection. Slide scanning enables 3D data capture, facilitates remote collaboration, improves reproducibility of taxonomic identifications, and creates permanent digital records that mitigate risks of physical deterioration. This protocol provides practical guidance for institutions looking to digitize slide-based collections to preserve and unlock their full research potential.

Arctic Indigenous communities have long adapted to extreme environments through women's expertise in crafting garments from fish skin (salmon and Arctic char), birdskin (seabirds: eiders, loons and puffins), gutskin (sea mammal and bear gut) and woven seashore grass (cottongrass and rye grass). Colonial-era collecting removed many of these belongings to distant museums, severing cultural ties. This study explores collaborative provenance research aimed at restoring relationships between museums, communities and their material heritage. Over 35 years, the Arctic Studies Center (ASC) at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, supported by consultations with Alaska Native Elders, has returned more than 600 artefacts, culminating in a permanent exhibition at the Anchorage Museum. Since 2017, as an ASC research associate, I have facilitated community-led workshops involving clothing to consult Indigenous knowledge systems and re-establish cultural continuity. In 2025, ASC and the Penn Museum co-hosted the ‘Deep Dig: Arctic Fashion’ virtual course, featuring Indigenous artists, scholars and museum professionals. I co-led two of the sessions, examining Arctic clothing as cultural heritage and sustainable innovation. In ‘Arctic Fashion: Sustainability, Identity and Healing’, together with ASC curator Stephen Loring, we contrasted the ecological knowledge of traditional Arctic garments with the impacts of Western fashion. In ‘Salmon Entanglements’, with Native Elder June Simeonoff Pardue, we discussed the role of fish by-products in Arctic life. Sugpiaq Elder Pardue's contribution exemplifies collaborative provenance research and the transformative potential of community-led participation. By building bridges between historical belongings and Indigenous communities, museums can repair historical legacies, developing new methods of knowledge co-production and dissemination.

ABSTRACT In a fraught cultural moment, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has committed to doing public history that is inclusive, intersectional, contingent and, forward‐looking. Deputy Director of Public History Benjamin Filene explores how these values run through two of the museum's major recent interpretive endeavors—creating a new Interpretive Plan for the museum and advancing a multifaceted commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—and suggests how they have shaped early visions for reimagining the museum's East Wing, nearly half of its public space. Throughout, Filene foregrounds tensions and possibilities in the museum's commitment to doing audience‐centered work that is grounded in scholarship and attuned to conflicting expectations from the museum visitors.

The Lucky Hill meteorite, discovered in 1885 in Jamaica, remains one of the lesser-studied Caribbean specimens. In this study, we introduce for the first time the use of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) to characterize a representative fragment (USNM 2889) from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Our SEM-EDS investigation reveals extensive terrestrial weathering — manifested as iron oxide/oxyhydroxide conversion, including the formation of akaganeite — and confirms the presence of key meteoritic phases such as kamacite (with 7.88 wt.% Ni) and schreibersite. These findings support its extraterrestrial origin and suggest that significant alteration has obscured primary crystalline features. The results contribute to a more detailed mineral-specific understanding of Lucky Hill’s composition and provide a basis for further investigations (e.g., via LA-ICP-MS) into the effects of environmental weathering on Caribbean meteorites.

The Sports Collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

The northern wasp fly, Ceriana abbreviata Loew (Diptera: Syrphidae), is a rare species of flower fly occurring across a broad range in North America from the Northwest Territories, Canada to southern Arizona, USA.There are 107 physical specimens of C. abbreviata deposited between the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes (CNC; 53 specimens) and miscellaneous institutions as reflected in the CNC database (an additional 8 specimens deposited in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History; 4 specimens deposited in the American Museum of Natural History) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility database (GBIF 2025; 42 specimens).Of these records, 26 are from Ontario.Collection records for Ontario show that the species' flight period is between May and July.Nearctic Ceriana is easily distinguished from other Syrphidae in the region as it is the only genus in northeastern North America with a distinct antennifer, long antennae (scape three to four times as long as wide), each of which has a terminal stylus instead of an arista, and bare eyes (Figure 1) (Vockeroth and Thompson 1987).Ceriana abbreviata has a noted resemblance to Potter wasps (Hymenoptera: Vespidae: Eumeninae) (Metcalf 1913).This species is most likely to be confused with C. mime (Hull), a poorly defined relative in need of revision.The larvae of this species are known to be saprophagous, with a single larva of C. abbreviata being reared from Populus balsamifera L. (Salicaceae) (Skevington et al. 2019; CNC_Diptera37864), and three larvae collected from sap-soaked detritus in a tree hole of Liquidambar styraciflua L. (Altingiaceae) (Maeir 1982;Rotheray et al. 1998).Curran (1925) suggests that the genus (therein referred to as Cerioides Rondani) is univoltine, likely overwintering as larvae on host plants.Maier and Waldbauer (1979) found that C. abbreviata adults are most active in mid-morning hours in response to floral anthesis and hygrothermal stress.Maier and Waldbauer (1979) also note that more C. abbreviata females were collected in proximity to flowers than males.The first known record of C. abbreviata from Canada is a specimen (ROME90508) collected in June 1895 from Toronto, Ontario by William Brodie.The second record is a female specimen (CNC_Diptera37872) collected in June 1913 from Guelph, Ontario

Abstract This note offers a preliminary survey of archives containing photographic material – both digitized and nondigitized – related to northern Ghana. Despite the region’s historical marginalization, this condition has not necessarily resulted in a scarcity of sources. On the contrary, numerous archives preserve rich and underexplored photographic documentation. By identifying and describing key collections across institutions such as the White Fathers phototèque, the Ministry of Information in Accra, the University of Cambridge, the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, the Imperial War Museum, the National Archives in London, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, this note seeks to illuminate underexplored visual sources.

The European Parliament resolution of 19 January 2016 on the role of intercultural dialogue, cul-tural diversity and education in promoting EU fundamental values states: „Recognises the importance of for- mal, non-formal and informal learning, as well as volunteering, to promote self-development focusing on cognitive and non-cognitive skills and competences, critical thinking, capacity to deal with different opinions, media literacy, anti-discrimination and intercultural skills and competences and language learning as well as social and civic competences including learning about cultural heritage as a tool to address contemporary challenges through sensitive interpretation“. Here comes the role of virtual educational tourism, which is rapidly transforming the way learners engage with cultural content. It offers innovative opportunities for global exploration, free from the constraints of physical travel. The aim of this paper is to examine the educational potential of vir- tual tours provided by major cultural institutions, such as the British Museum, the Louvre, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Vatican Museums, the State Hermitage Museum, the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Kyoto National Museum. The study assesses how these digital experiences contribute to essential learning outcomes, including the development of critical thinking, intercultural understanding, and subjectspecific literacy in areas such as history, art, and social studies. The paper investigates strategies for integrating virtual tours into formal curricula to enrich student engagement and broaden access to cultural learning, particularly for students in underserved or geographically remote educational settings.

Abstract In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World is a first-of-its-kind exhibition developed by a group of international curators, historians, and cultural practitioners, and is the product of a multi-year collective called the Global Curatorial Project (GCP). The GCP formed in 2014 to address key questions on how we think about, interpret, and discuss the histories of global racial slavery and colonialism with broad publics in institutions around the world. The subsequent exhibition developed by the GCP, In Slavery’s Wake, opened at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. in December 2024. The creation of the exhibition centered the voices of descendants of enslaved and colonized people, through which an archive titled Unfinished Conversations was developed with more than 150 oral history interviews from around the world. The members of the GCP sought to create a model of the vital role that museums and public-facing institutions can play in fostering and advancing conversations around the legacies of slavery and colonialism on both local and global terrain that reach past conventional boundaries of race, nation, and language. This article explores the transformative process of exhibition creation and collaboration that worked to decolonize the exhibition-making process, push institutional boundaries, and forge pathways for future work that decenters the nation-state toward a global understanding of how we continue to live in the wake of racial slavery and colonialism.

ABSTRACT Women’s rights activists have described museums and other heritage sites as tools of advocacy to fight the scourge of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). Museums can sensitize the public to sexual crimes related to war and genocide and, it is hoped, help pursue justice for survivors and prevent further violence. For war museums, the curation of CRSV nonetheless poses ethical and political challenges. This study asks, how do leading war museums in the United States and United Kingdom curate the memory of CRSV, including that perpetrated by liberal democracies? It examines war exhibits at the Imperial War Museum (London) and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (Washington, D.C.) and considers strategies, dilemmas, and openings in their attempts at evoking CRSV. IWM privileges verbal narrative and centres CRSV perpetrated by authoritarian states. NMAH presents photos featuring sexual violence perpetrated by military personnel of the United States, a liberal democracy, while also obscuring this violence by not verbally recognizing it. The article argues that each exhibit addresses some feminist concerns while obfuscating others. It concludes by advocating curatorial strategies that invite a visceral empathetic connection with victims/survivors – testimonies, art, and immersive experiences – while balancing conflicting feminist ethical imperatives.

Stellifer naso is known from the State of Bahia (Brazil), but there is a lack of an accurate definition of its type locality. Thayer's expedition (around 1865–1866), led by Louis Agassiz and staff from the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ, Harvard University), intended to explore Brazilian fauna and flora, with most of its material housed in the MCZ and used to describe several species, including S. naso. Examination of specimens from the original description of that species, housed in the MCZ and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, helped review the accurate point of origin for such specimens. A combination of data from reproductive biology and the history of the region further support the actual type locality of S. naso as Iguape Bay, with an error radius of 2.5 km. Damming in the Paraguaçu River in the early 1980s might have had an impact on the morphological variation over time recorded to this species.

Aflac extends support for Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The genus Meiodorvillea Jumars, 1974 was established to better categorize the species M. minuta (Hartman 1965), which was previously classified under the genus Protodorvillea Pettibone 1961. The prefix “Meio” refers to the meiofaunal size of the genus, and along with their fragile bodies makes these organisms difficult to collect and identify. As a result, many specimens are only deposited at the genus or family level in museums. By examining unidentified specimens deposited at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, we identified and described two new species of the genus: Meiodorvillea wolfi sp. nov. and Meiodorvillea smithsoniensis sp. nov. The former is morphologically distinct from its congeners due to its anteriormost free maxillae plate, which has a pincer-like format. The latter species is characterized by the presence of furcate chaetae in the first two parapodia, which are subsequently replaced by a geniculate chaeta in the next few parapodia, and then revert to a furcate chaeta thereafter. An updated identification key for the species of Meiodorvillea and an emended diagnosis have also been provided. http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:1159E466-D906-4363-96D9-56B434CBD9B7

This article derives from the conversation I had with Richard Potts in June 2023 about his work at the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (Washington D. C.). Dr. Potts is one of the most renowned paleoanthropologists for his research about early humans in Africa and the curation of the exhibit “What does it mean to be human?” at the NMNH. My primary objective was to explore his role in advancing our understanding of humanity’s evolutionary heritage within the broader discourse on world heritage. The interview, conducted in Dr. Potts’s office on June 9, 2023, was recorded and published with his informed consent. His insights shed light on various aspects of artifact acquisition, preservation, and interpretive guidance—key elements in the ongoing social and academic debates surrounding heritage. This includes a perspective rooted in the field of public archaeology that views its practice as a reflexive form of action, intended to raise awareness and foster interconnection between society and archaeological work. From this standpoint, museums serve as fundamental hubs in heritage creation, shaping aesthetic, ethnographic, archaeological, and historical perspectives in alignment with historical agendas, preservation ideologies, conflicting memories, and particular values regarding exhibition, design, and display. They highlight the complex interactions between classification and preservation, the identity narratives they encompass, the scientific and political agendas that shape them, the international networks supporting them, and the communities they cultivate through Potts’ vision.

At the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (SI NMNH), the Assistant Registrar and Informatics Manager in the Department of Paleobiology (Paleo) have identified key linkages between registering collections (documentation for specimens and data through acquisitions, loans and disposals) and management of digitized collections, especially for usage right designation. Both roles require extensive collaboration on a shared framework for managing data related to the provenance of fossil specimens and rights associated with any derivative digital assets. This eliminated a disconnect in overlapping responsibilities: those typically siloed in museum registration practices (e.g., provenance data, intellectual property rights) and the data typically siloed in collections management and digitization workflows (e.g., data quality, digital asset management, and usage rights). Paleo shifted to a new practical approach and mindset focused on communal thinking. This propelled implementation of data standard practices and laid the building blocks for a shared community perspective on digitizing paleontological collections. Since 2020, Paleo established processing workflows for digital asset requests of the fossil collections (new digital asset creations vs. use of existing digital assets) and baseline understandings about rights of digital assets. These products led to a comprehensive effort to outline SI NMNH’s options to designate usage rights for digital assets (Table 1) and distribute basic understandings about Smithsonian Terms of Use and Smithsonian Open Access Policy (SI OA) across SI NMNH. Paleo explored this topic further by engaging in virtual meetings, conferences, presentations and informal discussions with the collections management staff and data managers across SI NMNH and externally with domestic and international groups such as the Paleo Data Working Group (PDWG), Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) Registrars Group, and Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), to develop data standards initiatives for loans, permits and sensitive data (Fig. 1). Through regular community engagement, Paleo forged a concise, yet evolving, perspective on digitizing collections, which aligned both registration and informatics data management needs within the department and museum (Fig. 2). This multi-professional perspective enables the promotion of shared community knowledge and understanding about data rights. The primary purpose is to balance consistent goals, current needs, and long-term outcomes with the flexibility to adapt our practices based on institution-specific policies, new research methods, and varying domestic and international regulations and laws. The notable outcomes from almost four years of work are highlighted and incorporated into Paleo's departmental policy and documentation requirements for processing and fulfilling digital asset creation or use requests workflows and distribution of this information to the public website for visitors and borrowers. However, there are still persisting challenges related to registering and managing these digital assets. There are immediate and future obstacles such as: limitations in effective tracking methods to record creation of digital assets, use of digital assets, and designation of what usage rights and when the decision was made; gaps in community practice, policy and regulations at the institutional level and globally; past practices in workflows and staff structures or lack thereof, which have left digital assets in limbo without means of accessing the data or documentation to identify the appropriate use options and rights. We see a need to continue asking questions. How are varying policies across institutions globally, impacting compliance concerns in registration for sharing sensitive information with other research institutions? How have or will new research techniques and opportunities impact the need for flexibility in practices and decisions? Are there alternative ways to utilize a Collections Management Systems (CMS) or use other platforms to track, store and manage the digital assets? How have others engaged in community discussions to address overlapping needs for data standards and registration of digitized collections? These identify significant inconsistencies across the community that need further discussion with subject-matter experts before effective and comprehensive decisions in data standards for managing digitized collections can be made. Ultimately, there are outstanding questions and challenges at all stages for registering, digitizing and managing digital assets of natural history collections. We continue to unveil nuances in thinking about this topic and find the need for structures of shared knowledge built and actively engaged in by a professionally diverse community. The utilization of subject-matter experts encourages collaboration and alternative perspectives to standardize operations and policy while expanding community efforts and awareness.

Over the last decade, the United States paleontological collections community has invested heavily in the digitization of specimen-based data, including over 10 million USD funded through the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program. Fossil specimen data—9.0 million records and counting (Global Biodiversity Information Facility 2024)—are now accessible on open science platforms such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). However, the full potential of this data is far from realized due to fundamental challenges associated with mobilization, discoverability, and interoperability of paleontological information within the existing cyberinfrastructure landscape and data pipelines. Additionally, it can be difficult for individuals with varying expertise to develop a comprehensive understanding of the existing landscape due to its breadth and complexity. Here, we present preliminary results from a project aiming to explore how we might address these problems. Funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and Arizona State University will result in, among other products, an “ecosystem map” for the paleontological collections community. This map will be an information-rich visualization of entities (e.g. concepts, systems, platforms, mechanisms, drivers, tools, documentation, data, standards, people, organizations) operating in, intersecting with, or existing in parallel to our domain. We are inspired and informed by similar efforts to map the biodiversity informatics landscape (Bingham et al. 2017) and the research infrastructure landscape (Distributed System of Scientific Collections 2024), as well as by many ongoing metadata cataloging projects, e.g. re3data and the Global Registry of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl). Our strategy for developing this ecosystem map is to model the existing information and systems landscape by characterizing entities, e.g. potentially in a graph database as nodes with relationships to other nodes. The ecosystem map will enable us to provide guidance for communities working across different sectors of the landscape, promoting a shared understanding of the ecosystem that everyone works in together. We can also use the map to identify points of entry and engagement at various stages of the paleontological data process, and to engage diverse members within the paleontological community. We see three primary user types for this map: people new(er) to the community, people with expertise in a subset of the community, and people working to integrate initiatives and systems across communities. Each of these user types needs tailored access to the ecosystem map and its community knowledge. By promoting shared knowledge with the map, users will be able to identify their own space within the ecosystem and the connections or partnerships that they can utilize to expand their knowledge or resources, relieving the burden on any single individual to hold a comprehensive understanding. For example, the flow of taxonomic information between publications, collections, digital resources, and biodiversity aggregators is not straightforward or easy to understand. A person with expertise in collections care may want to use the ecosystem map to understand why taxonomic identifications associated with their specimen occurrence records are showing up incorrectly when published to GBIF. We envision that our final ecosystem map will visualize the flow of taxonomic information and how it is used to interpret specimen occurrence data, thereby highlighting to this user where problems may be happening and whom to ask for help in addressing them (Fig. 1). Ultimately, development of this map will allow us to identify mobilization pathways for paleontological data, highlight core cyberinfrastructure resources, define cyberinfrastructure gaps, strategize future partnerships, promote shared knowledge, and engage a broader array of expertise in the process. Contributing domain-based evidence FAIRly*2 requires expertise that bridges the content (e.g. paleontology) and the mechanics (e.g. informatics). By centering the role of humans in open science cyberinfrastructure throughout our process, we hope to develop systems that create and sustain such expertise.

Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) has been used for isotope analysis of volatile components dissolved in silicate melts for decades. However, carbon in situ stable isotope analysis in natural silicate glasses has remained particularly challenging, with the few published attempts yielding high uncertainties. In this context, we characterized 31 reference silicate glasses of basaltic and basanitic compositions, which we then used as reference materials to calibrate δ13C − value analyses in silicate glasses by SIMS. This set of reference materials covers a wide range of CO2 concentrations (380 ppm – 12,000 ppm) and δ13C values (−28.1 ± 0.2 to −1.1 ± 0.2 ‰, ±1σ). The sets of reference materials were analyzed using large−geometry SIMS at two ion microprobe facilities to test reproducibility across different instrumental setups. The instrumental mass fractionation (IMF) varied widely with two different large−geometry SIMS instruments as well as with different analytical parameters such as field aperture size and primary beam intensity. We found that a precision better than ±1.1 ‰ (both average internal and external precision, ±1σ) for CO2 content higher than 1800 ppm could be achieved using a primary beam intensity of less than 5 nA, resulting in a final spot size of 10–20 μm, allowing precise analysis of δ13C in mineral−hosted melt inclusions. This level of precision was achieved at CO2 concentrations as low as 1800 ppm. This advance opens a wide range of new possibilities for the study of δ13C − value in mafic melts and their mantle sources. The reference materials are now available at the CNRS–CRPG ion microprobe facility in Nancy, France and will be deposited at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, USA where they will be freely available on loan to any researcher.

Archaeological work leaves material histories, from archival notes to containers that used to store artifacts. Rarely, however, are these containers preserved or valued as technologies that codified and organized archaeological information. This paper analyzes a collection of matchboxes that were formerly used as artifact containers in a 1940s excavation in Coahuila, Mexico. The matchboxes, never formally accessioned and yet still saved by collections staff, are housed In the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) Museum Support Center. By tracing the labor regimes the matchboxes passed through, the specimens they once contained, and the hands that used them in a multitude of ways, this project uses the matchboxes’ microhistories to reveal how archaeological containers influenced archaeological science. This research argues for a treatment of the matchboxes as artifacts themselves, worthy of formal accession and of value for their role in the history of archaeological science.

In the introduction to Curating the American Past, Pete Daniel tells us what to expect: “Attacking is far more exciting than defending” (3). The remainder of the book makes good on that epigram as Daniel chronicles his career as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History (1982–2009). He acknowledges that he approached the work with “a naïve belief that [the Smithsonian] soared above political skirmishes and lived up to its sterling reputation as a temple of learning” (7). Daniel describes the first twenty years as “frantic with collecting, exhibits, writing books, and exciting projects,” but his frustration grew as “visionless leadership” eviscerated the curatorial staff (7–8).Daniel makes clear that the memoir grew out of frustration that existed earlier in his curatorial career but that escalated over time. This warning should prepare readers for blunt and often critical assessments. He shares names and pulls no punches. He does not try to reason through decisions that he believed threatened the museum's integrity. Instead, Daniel lays out the facts as he perceived them and leaves it to others who care about intellectual rigor, public engagement, exploration of crucial history, and museum ethics to investigate further.Real nuggets abound in Curating the American Past. Those who know Daniel's publications will become acquainted with his public history side, such as the relationship between his work on the exhibition Science in American Life, which opened in April 1994, and his book Toxic Drift (2007). Those who know Daniel through his work with Smithsonian Fellows will learn more about how selected fellows’ study of Southern rural life and history enhanced collections and scholarship alike. All readers will learn more about the heavy lift that curation involves, especially when the subject—agriculture—becomes subsumed under numerous other themes more appealing to donors. This probably accounted for administrative decisions that undermined Daniel's goals to curate an exhibit in his area of expertise (rural Southern life). Frustrated but undeterred, he documented that past and wrote about it. His award-winning articles and books stand as permanent evidence of his thoughtful and detailed framing of a South that he lived, researched, and preserved for future reference.Surveys indicate that public trust in museums remains high, and that the public expects museums to address crucial history, the type of history that Daniel spent his career researching, collecting, and writing about, and encouraging numerous Smithsonian fellows to pursue the same. While no exhibit stands as a testimony to Daniel's Smithsonian career, Curating the American Past makes clear that his tenacity in defending historical work stands as a lasting and befitting legacy of his influence on agricultural history.