Cold War Kitchen

This study occupies a place of distinction in the literature on consumption, cultures of technology, popular culture of the Cold War, Americanization, and European identity and should be read by all interested in these fields. -- Dolores Augustine, Oxford Journals This book is a remarkably fresh and inventive contribution to the study of the technologies of empire. In their breadth and fine detail, the contributors, young European and American scholars, give a truly global view as they range from the U.S. to Moscow, from Finland to Turkey and through the corridors of the UN. Implacably, carefully, they demonstrate how the American kitchen, propelled by a myriad of supports from the assembly line and Hollywood cinema to the supermarket and State Department, operated as a pillar of U.S. Cold War hegemony. --Victoria de Grazia, Director, European Institute, and James R. Barker Professor of History and Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University Scholarly and provocative, these essays illuminate the links between the atomic politics of the Nixon-Khrushchev years and the humbler battles fought in Europe and America over the shaping of modern kitchens. Oldenziel and Zachmann's volume expands our understanding of the technological changes, gender politics, international consumer movements, and Americanization imperatives underlying the famed Moscow kitchen debate but also of the Cold War itself. --Joe Corn, Senior Lecturer Emeritus, Department of History, Stanford University A fine collection of studies exploring the selective reception of the American dream kitchen in the Soviet Union and Europe, East and West. These analyses demand that we include domestic technologies and material practices as key sites for exploring the historical and cultural roots of local resistance to the Americanization of consumers and their diverse life worlds. --John Krige, author of American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe