Celebrating the exotic and the ordinary

Editorial Staff Opinion

I first encountered the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities in the 1970s, when I was a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire. Wanting to learn more about the material world of seventeenth-century New England, I signed up for an architectural tour led by Abbott Lowell Cummings. It must have been in the fall. I remember …

Instant Symposium: The Kitchen Debate, 50 years later

Editorial Staff

Today marks the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous Kitchen Debate at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Their clash of ideologies played out among a series of show rooms—including a model kitchen by General Electric—and was broadcast worldwide, quickly becoming a seminal moment in the history of the Cold War. We asked …