The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side
Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature

A model kitchen served as the venue for one of the defining events of the Cold War. On July 24, 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev went head-to-head at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, part of a cultural exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union, with Nixon pointing to the labor-saving appliances of the model kitchen as evidence of what capitalism had done for the average American and could do for the average Soviet. ABC, CBS, and NBC all broadcast the “kitchen debate,” as American media dubbed it, the next day. The debate raised Nixon’s profile and established him as a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. It set the tone for a rising generation of cold warriors. Kate A. Baldwin begins The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side here, in the Cold War...