Harvey Goldberg Center for the Study of Contemporary History
Biennial Report for 2004 & 2005

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 I. GENERAL:

Goldberg Center Executive Committee:

Laird Boswell
Nan Enstad
Francine Hirsch
Steve Kantrowitz, co-chair
Al McCoy, co-chair
Tony Michels
Francisco Scarano
Brett Sheehan

Since its reorganization in 2001, the Goldberg Center has become an important part of the intellectual life on the Madison campus. With an income of about $4,000 a year from generous alumni donations, the Goldberg Center has provided seed capital for intellectual innovation within the History Department and for a wide variety of events across the campus.  

During 2004 and 2005, the Goldberg Center supported activities including several upcoming national conferences, a variety of campus-wide symposia and workshops, and a number of well-attended public lectures. The Center also proceeded with its efforts to digitize and make available copies of Harvey Goldberg's recorded lectures on the Madison campus; we expect to announce their availability in mid-2006.

 II.  FUTURE EVENTS—2006 to 2008: 

A.) Upcoming Conferences: "The Rise of America to World Power"

 The Goldberg Center is pleased to be a major sponsor for a broad, inter-disciplinary reassessment of America’s rise to world power during the 20th century through two conferences, the first in November 2006 on America’s early 20th century empire of islands and the second in 2008 on US foreign policy during the Cold War decades.

             In planning this initial conference on America’s early empire, a working group of scholars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reaching from the English Department to the Medical School, has developed a three-year program to draw scholars from across the country and across the globe for a series of conferences and workshops. In November 2006, a national conference on America’s early rise as a colonial power, entitled “Transitions & Transformations in the U.S. Imperial State,” will cover the US emergence as a global power in the first half of the twentieth century, 1898 to 1946. The Harvey Goldberg Center has committed up to $13,000 in matching funds for this conference. A second conference, “The Cold War as World Histories: Politics & Societies in the Post-Colonial Age," will follow in Spring 2008, covering America’s development as a superpower from 1948 to 1991. The Goldberg Center has committed up to $10,000 in matching funds for this conference.

 Both at the level organization and intellectual synergy, the two conferences will be closely coordinated. After the first conference, a series of campus writing workshops will the engage issues it raised in preparation for the second. To promote further dialogue between the two symposia, the co-chairs of the Cold War conference will serve as lead discussants in the Empires Conference--Steve Stern for the opening panel on imperial transitions and Jeremi Suri for the closing panel on the imperial transformation of the US state. Similarly, several participants in the Empires conference will be serving as discussants and presenters at the Cold War conference.

 These two conferences, Empires and Cold War, represent a comprehensive review of America's rise to world power in the twentieth century—in part, a revival of the venerable “Wisconsin School of Diplomatic History” that once brought great distinction to both the History Department and the Madison campus. The Goldberg Center is delighted to be able to contribute to this important Wisconsin tradition, helping to produce insights of interest to the larger community, at local, state, and national levels.

 B.) Other Events:

 Upcoming events in 2006 and 2007 also include a conference on the African Diaspora and a workshop on Equatorial Africa.

 III. ACTIVITIES IN 2004 and 2005:

 A.) Harvey Goldberg Lectures Project

 Over the past two years, the Center has devoted significant time and money to recovering, transcribing, digitizing, and archiving over a hundred of Harvey Goldberg's surviving lectures. In mid-2006, we expect to make some of these available to the public in exchange for a donation to the Center, in part to cover the costs of production and distribution. Audio clips from some of these lectures are already posted on our website (http://history.wisc.edu/Goldberg/Goldberg.htm); look for an announcement in the late spring of 2006.

 B.) Lectures, Workshops, and Symposia

 During 2004 and 2005, the Goldberg Center provided co-sponsorship for a wide array of activities on the UW campus.

 Saul Landau Lecture: On February 25, 2005, Saul Landau, Director of the Digital Media Programs at California State Polytechnic University, lectured on “US Policy In The 21st Century: From Wilsonian Alliances To The Culture of Naked Power” in the State Historical Society auditorium. About fifty attendees took part in a lively discussion, which was co-sponsored by the Center and the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies.

 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 at 40: From April 10 to April 14, 2005, the Center and Chadbourne Residential College co-sponsored a weeklong series entitled "The U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 at 40: Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Human Rights--Then and Now." which featured civil rights luminaries Anne Braden, Dolores Huerta, Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe, and Diane Nash, as well as Ms. Braden's biographer, Catherine Fosl. The events included public lectures, public conversations, roundtables, and classroom visits. Approximately six hundred people attended one or more of the events. Here is a flier for this remarkable series.

Other Campus Events: The Center also co-sponsored lectures in the fall of 2005 by Prof. Laura Hein (Northwestern), one of the leading authorities on modern Japan, and by Prof. David Emmons (Univ. of Montana), on the Irish in the nineteenth-century American West.

 Annual Goldberg Lecture: On September 30, 2005, Center co-chair Prof. Al McCoy delivered the 1st Annual Harvey Goldberg Lecture on “Torture and US Foreign Policy” at the dedication of the Harvey Goldberg classroom at the Brecht Forum in New York City.

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