This innovative treatment of the Kitchen Debate reveals the event not only as a symbol of U.S. -Soviet military and diplomatic rivalry but as a battle over living standards that profoundly shaped the economic, social, and cultural contours of the Cold War era. The introduction situates the Debate in a survey of the Cold War, and an unprecedented collection of primary-source selections--including Soviet accounts never before translated for an English-speaking audience--connects the Debate to consumer society, gender ideologies, and geopolitics. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions to consider, and a bibliography enhance students' understanding of this defining moment of the Cold War.

"Trucking Country" is a social history of long-haul trucking that explores the contentious politics of free-market capitalism in post-World War II America. Shane Hamilton paints an eye-opening portrait of the rural highways of the American heartland, and in doing so explains why working-class populist voters are drawn to conservative politicians who seemingly don't represent their financial interests.

Hamilton challenges the popular notion of "red state" conservatism as a devil's bargain between culturally conservative rural workers and economically conservative demagogues in the Republican Party. The roots of rural conservatism, Hamilton demonstrates, took hold long before the culture wars and free-market fanaticism of the 1990s. As Hamilton shows, truckers helped build an economic order that brought low-priced consumer goods to a greater number of Americans. They piloted the big rigs that linked America's factory farms and agribusiness food processors to suburban supermarkets across the country.

"Trucking Country" is the gripping account of truckers whose support of post-New Deal free enterprise was so virulent that it sparked violent highway blockades in the 1970s. It's the story of "bandit" drivers who inspired country songwriters and Hollywood filmmakers to celebrate the "last American cowboy," and of ordinary blue-collar workers who helped make possible the deregulatory policies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and set the stage for Wal-Mart to become America's most powerful corporation in today's low-price, low-wage economy.