C-SPAN Films University Class

Professor Warren Goldstein with class and C-SPAN crew.

A four-man C-SPAN film crew  was on campus  Nov. 15 to film Professor Warren Goldstein’s first-year seminar course, Beyond the Dreamer: the Life and Work of Martin Luther King Jr. The filming took place in the new K-F classroom in Mortensen Library.

The class was recorded for airing on C-SPAN’s American History TV for its Lectures in History program. As part of this program, C-SPAN visits a number of different college and university classrooms and tapes a class session in its entirety. The program allows C-SPAN’s audience members (about 42 million homes) to experience a genuine day in a class from beginning to end without interruption.

Goldstein, who is chair of the history department, College of Arts and Sciences, has long been interested in the history of the civil rights movement. He recently undertook a research project about King’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail, and the Birmingham desegregation campaign in the spring of 1963.

The class, which has 13 first-year students and a senior preceptor, was very interactive and featured a lengthy discussion of the context surrounding King’s protest efforts in Birmingham, Ala., and the overall status of the civil rights movement in 1963. It also included an analysis of the civil rights leader’s famous Letter and a series of photographs of Birmingham, juxtaposing images from 1963 and 2010, where there are now public memorials to the civil rights activists.

“The students were just terrific and did a wonderful job of handling the pressures involved in being filmed,” said Goldstein.”They had really prepared, and so we had a very lively dialogue.”

The program featuring Professor Goldstein’s class is scheduled to air on Sat., Dec. 3, at 8 p.m. and midnight, and again on Sun., Dec. 4, at 1 p.m.