New Books In Dance

In this episode I got to chat about two of my favorite things: the history of imperialism and Star Wars with Daniel Immerwahr, Professor of History at Northwestern University. Our conversation focused on his recent article “The Galactic Vietnam: Technology, Modernization, and Empire in George Lucas’s Star Wars,” in Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories, edited by David Milne and Christopher Nichols (Columbia University Press, 2022). In the piece her uses the film and the figure of George Lucas to explore various aspects of the United States in the Cold War. Were Ewoks the Viet Cong? Was the Death Star a B-52? Was Alderaan Hanoi? Listen and find out. Daniel Immerwahr earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2011 after undergraduate studies at both Columbia and Cambridge. His previous work includes Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Harvard, 2015) and the award winning and best-selling How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus