AT THE HEART of the History Department sits the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, which promotes innovative and effective teaching strategies and engages in community outreach and lifelong learning opportunities (goldbergcenter.osu.edu). The center is named for the beloved professor Harvey Goldberg, who taught history at Ohio State from 1950-1962. His lectures were legendary and often standing-room only (and you can still hear some of them on YouTube: goldbergcenter.osu.edu/about-us/lectures-by-harvey-goldberg). Professor Nicholas Breyfogle serves as the Director of the Center, alongside Laura Seeger, Digital Media and Learning Systems Specialist.
vessel in the South China Sea, 1975. Public Domain.
The Goldberg organizes regular teacher development workshops for university professors and high school teachers, both in Ohio and nationally, and freely offers a rich array of teaching resources and materials. It helps to train Ohio State faculty and graduate students in state-of-the-art pedagogical techniques and produces a series of annual webinars and podcasts. Among more than ten websites that bring history to the world, the center oversees the globally popular eHistory website, which is a collection of primary sources, documentary materials, online books and reviews that offer a window into the past for the general public, students, and scholars of history. (Other websites include Temperance and Prohibition, A Well-Informed People, and the History Teaching Institute.)
Among all the many achievements of the Goldberg Center, there are two jewels in the crown that deserve special attention - Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective and Picturing Black History. ■
Written by Nick Breyfogle, Associate Professor of History, Director of the Goldberg Center
About Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective
Looking for an engaging introduction to the history behind today’s headlines? Look no further than Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.
Origins is a digital, multimedia platform that connects history with today through rich stories and engaging analysis. The project launched in 2007 and has now built an annual audience of more than 4 million people across the planet. A trusted, insightful, and free public history platform, its central mission is to produce historically based, insightful analysis of today’s most pressing current events and to make this knowledge and analytical understanding easily available to a diverse public. Origins content is used in classrooms all over the world. It was created by Breyfogle and Steven Conn of Miami University, and more recently joined by Andrew Offenburger and David Steigerwald, as well as more than 25 Ohio State and Miami graduate students over the years.
In connecting past and present, Origins aims to foster a better informed, more thoughtful citizenry. Indeed, Origins aims to bring to life the words of Toni Morrison: “For insight into the complicated and complicating events ..., one needs perspective, not attitudes; context, not anecdotes; analyses, not postures. For any kind of lasting illumination the focus must be on the history routinely ignored or played down or unknown.”
Origins offers multiple platforms and media to connect people to history, including: a wide range of long- and short-form essays (features, milestone anniversaries of important historical moments, top ten lists, postcards from around the world, and reviews of books, movies, and museums); the Origins OSU video channel (youtube.com/c/OriginsOSU and origins.osu.edu/watch); three podcasts: Prologued, History Talk, and History Notes (available in multiple places, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, origins.osu.edu/listen, and SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts). Origins also produces a suite of very popular teacher resources (origins.osu.edu/teach), which include ready-made, plug-and-play lesson plans for middle and high school teachers and students.
While bringing the news of the nation and the world into historical context for more than 15 years, Origins has created a series of special, in-depth collections. In response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Origins developed: “COVID-19 in Historical Context. Pandemics Past, Present, and Future: What history teaches us about how to prepare for, survive, and rebuild from pandemics” (origins.osu.edu/coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic-1918-flu-hiv-vaccination). Origins has also focused on “Black Lives in American History” (origins.osu.edu/Black-Lives-In-American-History) to offer important historical context in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the “Ukraine at War” collection (origins.osu.edu/tag/ukraine) in partnership with the Havighurst Center at Miami University and the Slavic Center at Ohio State.
Follow Origins on social media @OriginsOSU.
