A rich archive of the visual imagination of the Cold War era

Explore 1,500 Soviet propaganda posters showcasing the USSR’s visual cultu

This extensive gallery curated by Ben Perry features nearly 1,500 Socialist Realist posters. The images celebrate agriculture, industry, and cultural life, condemn fascism and capitalism, and glorify leaders like Lenin and Stalin through bold colors, striking typography, and classic Soviet design.

'Cold War Conversations' podcast shares voices from the conflict's frontlines

This award-winning podcast features gripping interviews with the people who lived through the Cold War—spies, soldiers, defectors, and civilians. Covering everything from the Berlin Wall to nuclear standoffs, it offers unfiltered, emotional accounts of Cold War life and conflict.

Explore the material culture of socialist Cuba

Even the objects of everyday life were politicized under socialism. This catalog of Cuban artifacts, collected between 1959 and the fall of the Soviet Union, reveals how revolutionary values infiltrated the most ordinary of items—from cocktail coasters to cologne.

See a timeline of the space race

This interactive timeline chronicles the space race from its Cold War origins to the moon landing, highlighting key figures, pivotal moments, and rapid technological advancements. It combines archival photos, video, and links to related material.

American modernism highlighted a rapidly changing America

Featuring work from 1915 to 1950, the movement illustrates the country's evolution between World War I and World War II. Artists captured the loss and uncertainty of a post-war, industrialized world.

A digital archive of the Korean War

The Korean War largely shaped the evolution of the Cold War in Asia. Explore the Wilson Center’s digital collection of primary sources—including essays, profiles, popular documents, and a timeline—to learn about the Korean War. In 1945, the...

A collection of contemporary maps from World War II

Newspapers published detailed maps of the conflict in real-time. See different portrayals of the situation, ranging from propaganda maps to speculative maps about the war's outcome. The fascinating depictions reveal how maps can show us the aspirations and intentions of different players in a global conflict.

Take a multimedia journey through the thirteen days that nearly ended the world

In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. This interactive archive from the JFK Library reconstructs those tense days through documents, photos, and secretly recorded conversations from the Kennedy White House.

Defining Dalí's surreal aesthetic

Salvador Dalí is known for his modernist paintings, but his surreal aesthetic has lived on long after his passing, with elements of his art making their way into fashion, film, and interior decorating. This incisive Artnet explainer unpacks the elements that make up Dalí's larger artistic vision and highlights the ways they still appear throughout popular culture.

Learn how the Soviets won the early space race

This video traces how Cold War arms competition transformed rocketry into a symbol of global power, following pioneers like Tsiolkovsky and von Braun through World War II and into the 1950s, culminating in the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik I in 1957.

The Bomb-proof, Cold War-era New York data center inspiring spy movies

At 33 Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, a 45-story concrete tower with no windows stands imperiously over the city. Inside, 18 floors of telecommunications technology have hummed for decades. The building's purpose—to protect US comms from nuclear fallout—and its design have played into spy movie plotlines. Dive into the building's curious role in pop culture with this long read.

Cold War soft power helped sell the space race to the American public

The fear of Soviet dominance prompted the US to invest heavily in space, but public support was also crucial. This video shows how marketing, media, and "soft power" framed spaceflight as peaceful, aspirational, and worth the cost—helping sustain the space race at home.

Some art critics believe that Liminalism, a form of art exploring the uncanny yet familiar, defines our present moment

While analyzing images of abandoned malls or empty hallways, art historians and critics argue that this style captures the feelings of this moment in time. Liminalism, they propose, expresses prominent themes in our age like anonymity, alienation, and anxiety.

The de stijl movement embraced bright colors and abstract images

The 20th-century movement sought to develop a universal language for the modern era by fusing form and function. Modern day viewers will recognize its bright colors and clean aesthetic, popular with retro-styled book and album covers.

See the Russian Revolution reimagined as if it unfolded on social media

This creative project retells the lead-up to the 1917 October Revolution as a Facebook-style newsfeed, blending archival photos with excerpts from letters and diaries by figures like Trotsky, Gertrude Stein, and Stravinsky to recreate events in a modern format.

Riveting artwork from the battlefields during World War I

During World War I, the United States government commissioned eight artists to accompany American Expeditionary Forces to Europe to sketch and document what they saw. Drawing tanks, soldiers, shattered villages, and even German prisoners of war, the artists preserved much of the war as a matter of historical record and to rally support back home.

The ways Bauhaus still shapes modern life

The German art school was around for less than 15 years, but its aesthetic and philosophy can still be seen today in sleek, minimalist design, bold typefaces, and even the corporate aesthetics of IKEA, Apple, and other brands. This DW feature visits the schools that have taken up the Bauhaus legacy, using its ideas to tackle contemporary problems.

The ideas of Einstein and Freud combined in 'The Persistence of Memory'

The Persistence of Memory was painted on a canvas roughly the size of a sheet of paper, depicting a desolate landscape with melting clocks, ants, and a distorted figure. The piece incorporates Freud and Einstein's ideas, resulting in a haunting composition symbolizing time's fluidity and Dalí's personal anxieties.

‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’ mapped a major transition

The hilarious 1963 story offered insight into how Americans were shifting away from elite interests to “low culture” by focusing on customized cars and their teen enthusiasts in Southern California. Wolfe pokes fun at the trend while also recognizing young people’s post-war desire for freedom, individualism and creativity.

See an animated map of the entire Cold War.

An immersive curation of the world's rock art

A living archive of humanity’s ancient art and symbols, our shared history that is embedded as rock art and cave art in the landscape

See a collection of mind-bending architecture around the world, including a teapot gas station, a duck home, and a picnic basket building.

The aesthetics of the James Webb images

The highly popular images produced by the James Webb Space Telescope are an artful collaboration between data science and visual designers. The raw data reflects real physical aspects of space, but it arrives without visual representation. Visual experts assign colors to specific wavelengths, crop and orient images in an accessible way, and consider the emotional impact of images as they incorporate design principles into the final product. Learn the fascinating details here.

Googie architecture, a cousin of mid-century modernism, was a popular style for American roadside attractions.

The origin of atmospheric science while testing nuclear weapons during the Cold War

The arms race between the US and the Soviet Union saw both countries stockpiling and detonating hundreds of bombs underground, underwater, and in the atmosphere. To better predict where nuclear fallout would travel after these tests, scientists developed models that would serve as a foundation for those used to explain atmospheric circulation.

Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post created an idealized American life

The Saturday Evening Post’s circulation exploded in the early 20th century, due in no small part to Rockwell’s iconic cover illustrations, which often portrayed idyllic portraits of American life from the not-so-distant past. This documentary explores how Rockwell’s covers played on national nostalgia, creating a vision of the country that grew to be associated with the American Dream.

Watch a guided video tour of the Museum of Malware Art

The site includes installations, sculptures, textiles, musical pieces, and galleries inspired by malicious software and related technologies, including the ILOVEYOU virus, encryption protocols from ransomware attacks, and the Industroyer malware framework used by Russia to cut power to Ukraine.

Explore r/ColorizedHistory, a Reddit community that collects colorized versions of black-and-white historical photographs, from Olympic podiums to family portraits.

The early art of Dalí represents peak surrealism

When it debuted in New York in 1932, "The Persistence of Memory" captured international audiences with its absurd, dream-like reflection on time. In his later works, Dalí's work evolved and became more of a self-parody. This video breaks down the great Spanish artist's works.

A private repository of millions of FOIA-requested documents

The Black Vault is one of the largest privately run archives of declassified documents in the world. Explore UFO sightings, doorways on Mars, and more.

Why Bauhaus—the 20th-century design school and aesthetic movement—matters today

The school, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, was an experimental educational environment that valued the function of an object before its form, a philosophy that would animate the rise of minimalist and modernist design in the 20th century.

Pop art brought 'low culture' to the fine art world

Pop art’s embrace of kitsch American pop culture furthered a centuries-long tradition of the visual arts during the second half of the 20th century. Its most famous exemplars, including Andy Warhol, were heirs to a vast tradition they sought to transcend and upend.

How Lucia Moholy's photography captured the Bauhaus aesthetic

The photographer was one of the few affiliated with the school who photographed its locations, documenting the modern style long after the Nazis had driven its artists from Germany. This podcast episode explores why she went uncredited for so many years.

View a collection of digital museum resources about the Apollo program

Created by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, this collection includes detailed biographies of astronauts and scientists who worked on the program and interactive features on the technologies that made it possible.

Propaganda became a key weapon in the US–Soviet Cold War

Both superpowers waged a global battle for hearts and minds through propaganda—using film, radio, art and education to promote their values. The US emphasized freedom and prosperity, while the USSR championed socialism and anti-imperialism.

Science fiction or new technology?

Dystopian literature is no longer relegated to the page, with innovations like the Tesla Cybertruck and Meta virtual reality headsets mirroring the aesthetics of texts like "The Running Man" and "Neuromancer." In this essay, Casey Michael Henry argues that the images from these works remain while their messages have faded.

A history of Bauhaus, the influential 20th-century design movement

The design school was short-lived but immensely impactful, turning design in architecture, typography, and a number of other fields away from superfluous ornamentation and toward practical, straightforward expression. This history of the movement from the Metropolitan Museum of Art outlines its major figures, key events, and the ways its influence persists.

'The Armory Show' brought modernism and the 'avant-garde' to the US.

Designs for the Hubble Space Telescope were based on Cold War spy satellites

By incorporating elements of the KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellites, NASA could incorporate existing classified manufacturing expertise and infrastructure from the intelligence community to expedite the research project.

In 2015, a custom virus program was used to destroy and transform art images

At the Art Laboratory Berlin's "bOdy pandemOnium: Immersion into Noise" exhibit, Chicago-born artist Joseph Nechvatal explored viractualism—the interface between the biological and the technological—via a custom virus program that randomly altered images representing the human eye and rectum.

What was the Space Race?

​Want to know more about the Space Race? This article from the National Air and Space Museum dives into this intense Cold War competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Explore how the race transitioned from military rivalry to a quest for space exploration dominance, leading to milestones like the first satellite, Sputnik, and the iconic Apollo 11 Moon landing.

MoMA hosted 1962's 'Symposium on Pop Art,' which made the term 'pop art' official

MoMA's history with pop art and its conceptual roots extends to its early origins, and its collection of works includes iconic works like Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans" and Lichtenstein's "Drowning Girl."

Sexy radishes, big-time LOL

This kind of high-quality content is exactly the reason why Al Gore invented the internet. Open this post see the best collection of sexy radishes in the world!

Cold War rivalries fueled fierce competition in international sports

From Olympic medal counts to hockey showdowns, the US and USSR used sports to showcase ideological superiority. Athletic victories were framed as proof that each system—capitalist or communist—produced stronger, more disciplined citizens.

View an interactive collection of historical documents from the Viking project

This collection includes original mission bulletins, engineering and planning documents, and interview segments from more than 80 Viking team members who made the historic exploration of Mars’ surface by a lander possible.

A primer on the president's nuclear football

During the Cold War, the United States and the USSR were forced to prepare for a nuclear strike at a moment's notice, leading to a new innovation: the so-called "football" (known as the chemodanchik in Russia), a bag containing nuclear strike plans, authentication codes, and likely a communication device, which attended the country's leader wherever they went. This easy-to-read piece breaks down the history and lore around the high-stakes quirk in nuclear governance.

Browse some of the most iconic Bauhaus furniture

The Bauhaus style has become so commonplace that you might not have realized its influence on modern furniture, but the German school's impact is profound, from the Wassily and Barcelona chairs to Gropius' industrial style door knob.

A look inside North Korea through photographs

What does life look like inside North Korea? Get a behind-the-scenes peek through 38 photos in the Atlantic.

Explore a collection of resources celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ISS

The media includes a 3D model of the International Space Station, a gallery of images taken from there of Earth, a set of virtual puzzles created from images related to the station, and an ISS digital coloring book.

Explore the Council on Foreign Relations' essay collection on the future of US foreign policy

This project brings together expert essays examining the future of American strategy, regional relations, geoeconomics, great power rivalry, and war in a rapidly changing global landscape.