Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design
Greg Castillo, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley will discuss his latest book entitled Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design, which is an in-depth history of how domestic goods and environments were exploited on both sides of the Iron Curtain to promote either capitalism or socialism. Cold War on the Home Front reveals the tactics used by U.S. government agencies to seduce citizens of the Soviet bloc with state-of-the-art consumer goods, and the retaliatory tactics mobilized by Party authorities. Using a mosaic of sources ranging from recently declassified government documents to homemaking journals and popular fiction, Cold War on the Home Front contributes perspective on cultural politics and midcentury modernism at the dawn of the cold war.
