Larson, Jodi

Bio Sketch

Jodi Larson is an American cultural historian and researcher of the postwar United States (web-verified via OpenAlex, author A5009191937: five works, 1987–2018). Her OpenAlex record shows a Tufts University affiliation (2009) and a body of work squarely in postwar American cultural history: "American Tune: Postwar Campaign Songs in a Changing Nation" (2009), on postwar campaign music and national identity, and "The story of the suburbs in Anoka and Hennepin Counties" (2011), on Minnesota suburban history — an archive that sits squarely behind the Cold War domesticity, prefab suburbs, and consumer-culture politics of her 2018 chapter. The record also carries two 1987 cultural-resource-inventory survey reports, indicating a background in cultural resource management. No institutional homepage has been verified; beyond the chapter, her disciplinary home (history, American studies, or preservation) remains to be confirmed — flagged in the source note's open questions.

Key Works

• *Hearts and minds and dishwashers* (2018) — Chapter 47 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge): the Cold War domestic-interior program — the exhibition campaigns (So Wohnt Amerika, America at Home, We're Building a Better Life), the FCDA's militarized home (Operation Doorstep, The House in the Middle), and the "kitchen debate" as the climax of interior architecture's role in the Cold War.
• "American Tune: Postwar Campaign Songs in a Changing Nation" (2009) — study of postwar campaign music as national-political culture (Tufts University affiliation; not yet ingested).
• "The story of the suburbs in Anoka and Hennepin Counties" (2011) — suburban history of Minnesota's Anoka and Hennepin counties; the suburban-record background of the chapter's prefab-home politics (not yet ingested).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• kitchen-debate — the 1959 Nixon–Khrushchev exchange as interior architecture's Cold War climax
• hearts-and-minds — the interior as the chosen instrument of political persuasion
• soft-power — how America lived as a weapon in the war of domestic space
• propaganda — design exhibitions as state counter-propaganda
• civil-defense — the militarized American home (FCDA, Operation Doorstep, The House in the Middle)
• taylorism — "American Taylorism meeting German Wohnkultur" as the century's domestic-rationalization lineage
• frankfurt-kitchen — the lineage's canonical product (1926)
• cold-war — the theme page her chapter anchors

Relevance to the Core Research

Larson's chapter gives the wiki its Cold War register — the strongest single demonstration in the corpus that the domestic interior has been an instrument of statecraft. For the Researcher's interior-theory programme it matters in three ways. First, it supplies the historical proof for Teston's claim that the interior is "both spatial and political": before the discipline theorized the political interior, states deployed it ("Modern living was officially drafted as patriotism"). Second, it domesticates the wiki's spectacle/consumerism cluster: the "combat of commodities" and the "mass consumption of, well, consumption" at Sokolniki Park are consumerism operating as geopolitics at the scale of a kitchen, the everyday-interior counterpart to the iconic-building registers of Chase, Sklair, and Jencks. Third, it extends the kitchen page's room-type history — the Beecher planned workspace, the Lupton & Miller continuous kitchen, the Lawrence audit — with the room's geopolitical register: the kitchen as the room in which two economic systems claimed to trickle down "into the dishwashers and bedrooms of an average family." For the Gender and Space research area, the chapter documents the housewife as the Cold War's ideological battlefield — Nixon's "liberat[ion of] the housewife from home-slavery" against Khrushchev's "capitalist view of our women."

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Hearts and minds and dishwashers (Larson 2018) — the Cold War register: the exhibition campaigns, civil-defense policy, and the kitchen debate as interior architecture's geopolitical career.