Harvey Goldberg

Harvey Goldberg (March 13, 1922, Orange, New Jersey – May 20, 1987, Madison, Wisconsin) was an American historian and political activist.

Harvey Goldberg was born in Orange, New Jersey.

He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1943.

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.

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."

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 Jaurès.

A specialist in European social history, Goldberg began his career as a historian at Oberlin College.

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.

His books include a biography of the French democratic socialist Jaurès, 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."

Some publications are still only in French, such as his edits with Georges Haupt of the memoirs of Charles Rappoport.

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, and the wisdom to evolve...".

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.

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.

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.

"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."

He died of liver cancer on May 20, 1987.

He is buried at Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery.

In an era when professors might receive a round of polite applause on the last day of the semester, Goldberg got an ovation at the end of every lecture, which often ran well over the assigned time.

He enjoyed a large popular following and inspired many students to engage politically.

His lectures are still available from the Goldberg Center at the University of Wisconsin and through the website of the Brecht Forum, footnoted below.

His career as a lecturer began early.