A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy
eBook - PDF

A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy

The World War II Work of US Museums

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy

The World War II Work of US Museums

About this book

"Does it seem strange to think of a museum as a weapon in national defense?" asked John Hay Whitney, president of the Museum of Modern Art, in June 1941. As the United States entered the Second World War in the months to follow, this idea seemed far from strange to museums. Working to strike the right balance between education and patriotism, and hoping to attain greater relevance, many American museums saw engagement with wartime concerns as consistent with their vision of the museum as a social instrument.

Unsurprisingly, exhibitions served as the primary vehicle through which museums, large and small, engaged their publics with wartime topics with fare ranging from displays on the cultures of Allied nations to "living maps" that charted troop movements and exhibits on war preparedness. Clarissa J. Ceglio chronicles debates, experiments, and collaborations from the 1930s to the immediate postwar years, investigating how museums re-envisioned the exhibition as a narrative medium and attempted to reconcile their mission with new modes of storytelling.

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Yes, you can access A Cultural Arsenal for Democracy by Clarissa J. Ceglio in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Museum Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Introduction: The American Museum as Social Instrument
  8. Chapter One: Toward a Material Rhetoric of Social Instrumentality
  9. Chapter Two: Materializing the Good Neighborhood The Exhibitionary Network and Hemispheric Citizenship
  10. Chapter Three: War Comes to the Museum
  11. Chapter Four: Witnessing War Fare The Construction of Home - Front Citizenship
  12. Chapter Five: Gateways to Global Citizenship in a Postwar World
  13. Conclusion: Museum Stories, Old and New
  14. Notes
  15. Index
  16. Back Cover