Harvey Goldberg
Encyclopedia
Harvey Goldberg was a teacher, historian and political activist.
. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1943. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1951; the subject of his dissertation Jaurès and French foreign policy, was French Socialist leader Jean Léon Jaurès.
A specialist in European social history, Goldberg began his career as a historian at Oberlin College. After three years at Oberlin, Goldberg moved to Ohio State University, where he taught until 1963. His years at Ohio State were marked by extraordinary achievements in both scholarship and teaching. He published widely in journals ranging from The Nation to The International Review of Social History. His books include a biography of the great modern French democratic socialist, The Life of Jean Jaurès (1962), which The New York Times referred to as "The definitive biography, as dense with life, character and events as a Balzac novel."
Near the end of his book on Jaurès, Goldberg wrote, "He had the integrity to be partisan, the courage to be revolutionary, the humanism to be tolerant." His Ohio State students recognized and honored those same traits in Goldberg himself, as evidenced by his award as Professor of the Year by the Arts College Student Council in 1959 when he was just 36 years old.
In 1963, University of Wisconsin President Fred Harvey Harrington invited Goldberg to return to Madison. Goldberg was given the freedom to teach as he wished and the liberty to spend every third year in Paris
. As a faculty member, Goldberg carried the history department when it came to attracting large student enrollments that drove departmental budgets. He estimated that during his 40-year career he taught some 25,000 students. He also supervised 49 PhDs. Despite his contributions to the department, however, Goldberg never received a teaching award from Wisconsin.
Goldberg taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1963 until illness forced his hospitalization. He died of liver cancer on May 20, 1987. He is buried at Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery
.
His career as a lecturer began early. "I was just barely 23 when I began to talk and I've been talking ever since," he told an interviewer in 1977. His first lecture was before an ancient history class, when one of his professors "pulled me out of the corridor and into 272 Bascom. After that, everything was an anti-climax."
James K. Sunshine, a 1949 Oberlin graduate recalled that "After the war, a charismatic young history professor named Harvey Goldberg arrived and astonished his classes and much of the campus with incandescent lectures on European economic history. With the Cold War and the civil rights movement heating up, political liberalism and race relations began to dominate conversation, and Goldberg became a leading speaker at “Arch 7” mass meetings held after supper on the steps of the Memorial Arch to protest the latest iniquity in Washington, DC."
Goldberg's classes at Ohio State were frequently standing room only; several of them, including one on the death of Louis XVI and another on the fall of the Bastille, were Ohio State public events, not to be missed even by students not then enrolled in his courses. Goldberg taught in front of the lectern without the aid of notes. "I like to think" he said, "that the students and I melt to nothingness before the significance of the materials." He believed a teacher must "undertake to convey a kind of courage. If he's any good, he must live a life that is true and not hypocritical. He can teach the same kind of courage by example."
Goldberg began his lecture career at Madison in the fall of 1963, in a small room that held fewer than 100 students. By the second semester, he had been given a large lecture hall. Eventually, his audiences (both students and auditors) grew so large his lectures were held in the large auditorium of the Agriculture Hall, a venue capable of holding 600-700 people.
No one who witnessed his lectures at Madison could forget the drama of his meticulously crafted performances, delivered with an actor's sense of timing. Goldberg waited in the wings, then approached the podium and paused for a few beats. He would then take off his glasses, look off to the side of the stage as if expecting a cue, and then turn to the audience, waving his finger and declaring, "The point is, you know..." And once he had warmed to his topic, there was no stopping him. Because of Goldberg's reputation for consistently overrunning the 50-minute period, the History Dept. eventually learned to schedule his class in the de facto last slot of the day, 2:25 to 3:15, to minimize students being late for other commitments. In any case, he often spoke until 3:45 or even 4:00.
Noted jazz musician, music scholar and former Goldberg student Ben Sidran
likened this performance to jazz: "When he was onstage, he was transformed by the process and the information."
Another former student, independent film and television producer Sidney Iwanter, recalled that "For a quarter of a century, Goldberg's reed thin voice never faltered; he danced out his words from memory, a verbal misstep was as unheard of as a yawn from the audience. He spun rhetorical gold, his oratory soaring over the stellar landscape of the University of Wisconsin History Department, stimulating the standing-room-only crowds to ponder, if only shortly in their undergraduate lives, the march of the common man over that of common stocks."
Although he published comparatively little, Goldberg engaged in continual, massive research from French archives for use in his courses. His lectures were highly condensed narratives based on meticulously detailed research. In a sense, Goldberg was a storyteller whose scholarship was poured into his genius for the spoken word on the lecture stage.
Biography
Harvey Goldberg was born in Orange, New JerseyOrange, New Jersey
The City of Orange is a city and township in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the township population was 30,134...
. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1943. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1951; the subject of his dissertation Jaurès and French foreign policy, was French Socialist leader Jean Léon Jaurès.
A specialist in European social history, Goldberg began his career as a historian at Oberlin College. After three years at Oberlin, Goldberg moved to Ohio State University, where he taught until 1963. His years at Ohio State were marked by extraordinary achievements in both scholarship and teaching. He published widely in journals ranging from The Nation to The International Review of Social History. His books include a biography of the great modern French democratic socialist, The Life of Jean Jaurès (1962), which The New York Times referred to as "The definitive biography, as dense with life, character and events as a Balzac novel."
Near the end of his book on Jaurès, Goldberg wrote, "He had the integrity to be partisan, the courage to be revolutionary, the humanism to be tolerant." His Ohio State students recognized and honored those same traits in Goldberg himself, as evidenced by his award as Professor of the Year by the Arts College Student Council in 1959 when he was just 36 years old.
In 1963, University of Wisconsin President Fred Harvey Harrington invited Goldberg to return to Madison. Goldberg was given the freedom to teach as he wished and the liberty to spend every third year in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. As a faculty member, Goldberg carried the history department when it came to attracting large student enrollments that drove departmental budgets. He estimated that during his 40-year career he taught some 25,000 students. He also supervised 49 PhDs. Despite his contributions to the department, however, Goldberg never received a teaching award from Wisconsin.
Goldberg taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1963 until illness forced his hospitalization. He died of liver cancer on May 20, 1987. He is buried at Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery
Forest Hill Cemetery
Forest Hill Cemetery is located in Dane County, Madison, Wisconsin and was one of the first U.S. National Cemeteries established in Wisconsin.After the first permanent settlers arrived in Madison in the 1830s, the first non-native burials occurred on the current University of Wisconsin–Madison...
.
Teacher
For thousands of students, Harvey Goldberg was the greatest teacher of their lives. In an era when an average professor might receive a round of polite applause on the last day of the semester, Goldberg got an ovation at the end of every lecture.His career as a lecturer began early. "I was just barely 23 when I began to talk and I've been talking ever since," he told an interviewer in 1977. His first lecture was before an ancient history class, when one of his professors "pulled me out of the corridor and into 272 Bascom. After that, everything was an anti-climax."
James K. Sunshine, a 1949 Oberlin graduate recalled that "After the war, a charismatic young history professor named Harvey Goldberg arrived and astonished his classes and much of the campus with incandescent lectures on European economic history. With the Cold War and the civil rights movement heating up, political liberalism and race relations began to dominate conversation, and Goldberg became a leading speaker at “Arch 7” mass meetings held after supper on the steps of the Memorial Arch to protest the latest iniquity in Washington, DC."
Goldberg's classes at Ohio State were frequently standing room only; several of them, including one on the death of Louis XVI and another on the fall of the Bastille, were Ohio State public events, not to be missed even by students not then enrolled in his courses. Goldberg taught in front of the lectern without the aid of notes. "I like to think" he said, "that the students and I melt to nothingness before the significance of the materials." He believed a teacher must "undertake to convey a kind of courage. If he's any good, he must live a life that is true and not hypocritical. He can teach the same kind of courage by example."
Goldberg began his lecture career at Madison in the fall of 1963, in a small room that held fewer than 100 students. By the second semester, he had been given a large lecture hall. Eventually, his audiences (both students and auditors) grew so large his lectures were held in the large auditorium of the Agriculture Hall, a venue capable of holding 600-700 people.
No one who witnessed his lectures at Madison could forget the drama of his meticulously crafted performances, delivered with an actor's sense of timing. Goldberg waited in the wings, then approached the podium and paused for a few beats. He would then take off his glasses, look off to the side of the stage as if expecting a cue, and then turn to the audience, waving his finger and declaring, "The point is, you know..." And once he had warmed to his topic, there was no stopping him. Because of Goldberg's reputation for consistently overrunning the 50-minute period, the History Dept. eventually learned to schedule his class in the de facto last slot of the day, 2:25 to 3:15, to minimize students being late for other commitments. In any case, he often spoke until 3:45 or even 4:00.
Noted jazz musician, music scholar and former Goldberg student Ben Sidran
Sidran
Sidran is a surname and may refer to:*Abdulah Sidran, a Bosnian writer and poet who is renowned for his screenplays and dramas*Ben Sidran, an American jazz pianist*Leo Sidran, an American musician, composer, performer, and producer, son of Ben Sidran...
likened this performance to jazz: "When he was onstage, he was transformed by the process and the information."
Another former student, independent film and television producer Sidney Iwanter, recalled that "For a quarter of a century, Goldberg's reed thin voice never faltered; he danced out his words from memory, a verbal misstep was as unheard of as a yawn from the audience. He spun rhetorical gold, his oratory soaring over the stellar landscape of the University of Wisconsin History Department, stimulating the standing-room-only crowds to ponder, if only shortly in their undergraduate lives, the march of the common man over that of common stocks."
Although he published comparatively little, Goldberg engaged in continual, massive research from French archives for use in his courses. His lectures were highly condensed narratives based on meticulously detailed research. In a sense, Goldberg was a storyteller whose scholarship was poured into his genius for the spoken word on the lecture stage.
Goldberg's Books
- American Radicals; some problems and personalities, Monthly Review Press, 1957
- French Colonialism; progress or poverty?, Rinehart, 1959
- The Life of Jean Jaures, University of Wisconsin Press, 1962
The Lectures
A handful of Goldberg’s students, including Iwanter, recorded his lectures before a packed house in Agricultural Hall. Some of these “bootleg” recordings are part of a CD collection released jointly by UW–Madison’s Harvey Goldberg Center for the Study of Contemporary History and the community-based Harvey Goldberg Memorial Fund. A master list of all the Harvey Goldberg tapes at the University of Wisconsin Archives tapes is available from the Goldberg Center.External links
- The Harvey Goldberg Center for the Study of Contemporary History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with photos, audio recordings of lectures, and other resources (http://history.wisc.edu/goldberg/goldberg.htm )
- The Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio (http://goldbergcenter.osu.edu/page.cfm?content=about_main )
- The Harvey Goldberg Classroom at the Brecht ForumBrecht ForumThe Brecht Forum is an independent Marxist educational and cultural center in New York City, named after German writer Bertold Brecht. Throughout the year, the Forum offers a wide-ranging program of classes, public lectures and seminars, art exhibitions, performances, popular education workshops,...
in New York City, with photos and podcasts of lectures (http://old.brechtforum.org/harvey/goldberg-on-brecht/Welcome.html