History/Architecture

“A fascinating story about East and West at the start of the cold war. The scholarship is excellent, at once tightly focused and broadly inquisitive, and Greg Castillo’s lyrical writing captures the surprise and the drama in this powerful narrative. While focusing on official decisions about architecture, Cold War on the Home Front skillfully juxtaposes the two sides of the international conflict over Berlin, bringing the conflict alive and capturing the fullness of its meaning.” —Gwendolyn Wright, author of USA: Modern Architectures in History

“Cold War on the Home Front makes a significant contribution, both in terms of archival evidence and of the sophistication of Castillo’s argument, to an evolving literature on culture, consumerism, and the cold war. This book is richly informative.” —Walter Hixson, author of The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy

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 were, in fact, the culmination of a decade-long ideological battle fought with refrigerators, televisions, living room suites, and prefab homes.

The first in-depth history of how domestic environments were exploited to promote the superiority of either capitalism or socialism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Cold War on the Home Front reveals the tactics used by the American government to seduce citizens of the Soviet bloc with state-of-the-art consumer goods and the reactions of the Communist Party.

Greg Castillo is associate professor at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley, and a research associate at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney.

University of Minnesota Press
Printed in U.S.A.
Cover design by Jeenee Lee
Cover photograph from the Shelly Weinig Collection