ePub Black Women in America: Literature (Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America) by Edited by Darlene Clark Hine in History

Description

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. Beginning in 1950; the U.S. State Department sponsored home expositions in West Berlin that were specifically designed to attract residents of East Berlin; featuring dream homes with modernist furnishings that presented an idealized vision of the lifestyle enjoyed by the consumer-citizen in the West. In response; Party authorities in East Germany staged socialist home expositions intended to evoke the domestic ideal of a cultured proletariat.Castillo closely follows the course of this escalating rivalry between competing consumer cultures through the 1950s; concluding that the Soviet bloc's inability to make good on the claim that it could emulate goods and living standards offered by the West was a contributing factor in communism's eventual demise. Using a mosaic of sources ranging from recently declassified government documents to homemaking journals and popular fiction; Cold War on the Home Front contributes an engaging new perspective on midcentury modernist style and its political uses at the dawn of the cold war.