Introduction. Domesticity as a weapon -- Household affluence and its discontents -- Cultural revolutions in tandem -- Better living through modernism -- Stalinism by design -- People's capitalism and capitalism's people -- The Trojan house goes east -- Consuming socialism -- Epilogue. Critical masses -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index
Summary
Amid a display of sunshine-yellow electric appliances in a model home at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon squared off on the merits of their respective economic systems. One of the signature events of the cold war, the impromptu Kitchen Debate has been widely viewed as the opening skirmish in a propaganda war over which superpower could provide a better standard of living for its citizens. However, as Greg Castillo shows in Cold War on the Home Front, this debate and the American National Exhibition itself w