Beyond the missile and military: towards colourful Cold War histories

Emerging from an AHRC funded project on Materialising the Cold War, Cold War Museology (Douthwaite, J., Nehring, H., & Alberti, S. J. (Eds.) (2025). Cold War museology. Taylor & Francis) and Cold War Scotland (Alberti, S., Nehring, H., Douthwaite, J., & Harper, S. (2025). National Museum of Scotland) each offer nuanced and lively accounts of how the Cold War found material form in Europe, and how this period has come to be represented in museum and curatorial settings – often in ways that warrant further scrutiny and complexity. Both texts (each different in scope and context) are concerned with moving beyond simplistic and obvious narratives that so often dominate narrations of the Cold War. In this review, I draw on both texts to explore the difficulties in representing this time period, and the importance of ‘colouring the Cold War’, before offering some brief conclusions about the importance of space in interrogating the everyday.