As a U.S. cultural historian trained in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, Clarissa Ceglio works at the intersections of museum studies, public history, and digital humanities. Much of her research focuses on the affective and rhetorical roles that artifacts—material, visual, and digital—play in constructing national and social imaginaries within the context of museum work. Her book, A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy: The World War II Work of U.S. Museums (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), traces how, from the 1930s through to the immediate post-war years, the fledgling ideal of the museum as a “social instrument” active in current affairs led to new modes of storytelling through exhibition craft. Ceglio focuses on storytelling exhibitions designed to engage museum goers’ intellects, emotions, and senses in order inspire civic thought, feeling, and action on important issues of the day. She argues that this material rhetoric of social instrumentality posed a novel dilemma for the field—greatly complicated by wartime concerns—because it called what would now be called museum neutrality into question. The museum field grappled actively in these decades with the issue of where the line between social instrumentality and indoctrination lay. Indeed, to pass over wartime exhibitions as mere patriotic propaganda is to ignore how practitioners of the past sought to distinguish their efforts from jingoism. Likewise, to dismiss museums’ wartime activities as unconnected to ongoing concerns of the field is to divest contemporary activist public history and museum work from of its imperfect but instructive pasts.