You are here:

Ewing Lecture Series

The Ewing Lecture Series was established in 1973 to honor Robert H. Ewing for his 27 years of teaching and service at Lycoming College. A revered teacher and friend of the College, his life was characterized by a deep religious faith, a passion for history, and a strong devotion to a liberal arts education. These qualities touched the lives of all who came in contact with him and led his many friends to establish this annual Lecture Series to bring distinguished historians to campus to share their work with the Lycoming community.

Eric J. Goldberg, Ph.D.

March 25, 2025, 7:30 p.m.

Trogner Presentation Room

Eric J. Goldberg, Ph.D., professor of history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will deliver a talk entitled, “Soldiers, Rapine, and the Decline of an Empire.” In his talk, Goldberg will discuss the Frankish ruler Charlemagne (768–814) and his dynasty, the Carolingians, who conquered the peoples of Europe and created an empire. The Carolingian empire entered a period of political and military crisis during the later ninth century and abruptly came to an end in the year 888. Historians have proposed a range of explanations for the decline this empire: the incompetence of Charlemagne’s descendants and their squandering of royal lands, their failure to drive out the Vikings or curb the growing power of the Frankish “feudal” magnates, their misfortunes with premature royal deaths and childless marriages.

Goldberg’s talk proposes an alternative explanation: the inability of Charlemagne’s descendants to supply their armies. Fundamental transformations in Frankish warfare made it increasingly difficult for the later Carolingians to feed their soldiers and horses and maintain discipline among their troops. The result was a mounting epidemic of Frankish soldiers seizing supplies from their fellow countrymen and committing acts of violence against them. Kings and chroniclers referred to such alarming behavior as “rapine,” a technical term that went back to Roman law and described illegal requestions committed by men in the army. The late Carolingians never found a solution to the problem of rapine committed by their soldiers. Rapine ultimately undermined the legitimacy of the Carolingian dynasty and led to the breakup of their empire.

A specialist in the history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Goldberg’s research focuses on the politics and culture of the Merovingian, Carolingian, and Anglo-Saxon worlds. His first book, “Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817-876,” offers the first study in English of the reign of Charlemagne’s grandson, Louis the German (840-876). His second book, “In the Manner of the Franks: Hunting, Kingship, and Masculinity in Early Medieval Europe” explores the fascinating and little-understood history of hunting from the late Roman empire to the turn of the first millennium.

Among other awards, Goldberg has been awarded fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Counsel for Learned Societies, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.

Goldberg was a tenured professor at Williams College before coming to M.I.T. in 2009. Goldberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1998 and his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He was born and raised in San Francisco.

Past lecturers include:

• 2024 -- Dr. Arunima Datta
  "Waiting on Empire: Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain"
• 2023 -- Dr. T. Cole Jones
  “The Tory Rising: Insurrection in the Revolutionary South”
• 2022 — Dr. William Chester Jordan
  "The Harvest Indeed is Great, but the Labourers are Few; Strangers in the Medieval Countryside"
• 2019 — Dr. Jane Dailey
  "White Fright: Sex, Race and the African American Freedom Struggle"
• 2018 — Dr. Peter John Brobst
  "Two Navies, One Highway: Britain, America, and Global Sea Power since 1968"
• 2017 — Dr. Diane Sommerville
  "The Accursed Ills I Cannot Bear"
• 2016 — Dr. Paul Freedman
  "Basic Principles of Medieval Cuisine"
• 2015 — Dr. Jonathan Scott Holloway
  "Whose Memories Matter? Race, Identity, and the Battle for American History"
• 2014 — Dr. Leslie Brown
  "Power Politics in the Civil Rights Era"
• 2013 — Dr. Edward Ayers
  "Where Did Freedom Come From?"
• 2012 — Dr. Stanley Katz
  "Can the Liberal Arts College Help to Save Democracy?"
• 2011 — Dr. David Witwer
  "The Acid Attack on Victor Riesel and the Racketeer Menace in Cold War America"
• 2010 — Dr. Barbara A. Hanawalt
  "The Detection of Fraud in the Victualing Trade in Medieval London"
• 2009 — Dr. Antulio Echevarria, II
  "An American Way of War or Way of Battle?"
• 2008 — Dr. Kevin Boyle
  "Arc of Justice: The Sweet Case and the Course of Civil Rights"
• 2007 — Dr. James H. Merrell
  "Revisiting and Revising the Colonial American Frontier"
• 2006 — Dr. John J. Contreni
  "What Should We Know about the Crusades?"
• 2005 — Dr. Gabor Boritt
  "The Most Important Election in American History?"
• 2004 — Dr. David Nasaw
  "Andrew Carnegie: Marking Sense of Making Millions"
• 2003 — Dr. Mark E. Neely Jr.
  "The American Civil War: Foretaste of Terror?"
• 2002 — Dr. William H. Flayhart III '66
  "Perils of the Atlantic: Ship Disasters of the 19th Century"
• 2001 — Dr. Robert H. Zieger
  "Race and Labor in 20th Century America"
• 2000 — Dr. Ira Berlin
  "The Role of Memory in Writing the History of Slavery"
• 1999 — Dr. John Lewis Gaddis
  "We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History in light of Recent Revelations from Soviet Archives"
• 1998 — Dr. James T. Patterson
  "America's Grand Expectations After World War II"
• 1997 — Dr. Michael Burlingame
  "Emphatically the Black Man's President: Abraham Lincoln & Frederick Douglass"
• 1996 — Dr. Henry Friedlander
  "The Origins of Nazi Genocide"
• 1995 — Dr. Joan Hoff
  "Women and the Constitution"
• 1994 — Dr. Barbara Sicherman
  "The Education of Jane Addams"
• 1993 — Dr. Mary Beth Norton
  "The Curious Incident of the Gossiping Ladies of New Haven: Gender and Society in Seventeenth-Century America"
• 1992 — Dr. Roland G. Foerster
  "Defense and Sovereignty: Ten Theses on German Rearmament after the Second World War, 1945-1950"
• 1991 — Dr. Martin E. Marty
  "The Twentieth Century American Religious Scene: Important Conflicts/Few Dead Bodies"
• 1990 — Dr. John M. Murrin
  "Baseball, Football and Nineteenth Century American Political Culture"
• 1989 — Dr. John Wilson
  "Original Intent and the Church State Problem"
• 1988 — Dr. Peter Paret
  "The History of War as Part of General History"
• 1987 — Dr. Edward Pessen
  "George Washington Against the Cold War"
• 1986 — Dr. James H. Smylie
  "Jefferson's Statue for Religious Liberty: Historical, Social, and Constitutional Contexts"
• 1985 — Dr. Michael Vlahos
  "Strategy and National Culture"
• 1984 — Dr. Carl E. Prince
  "The Great Riot Year: Jacksonian Democracy and Patterns of American Violence in 1834"
• 1983 — Dr. Robert T. Handy
  "Common Themes in the Diverse History of Religious Groups in America"
• 1982 — Dr. Harold E. Deutsch
  "The Influence of Ultra in World War II"
• 1981 — Dr. Edmund S. Morgan
  "The Invincible Yeoman Farmer"
• 1980 — Dr. Hans Hillerbrand
  "The Reformation and the Peasants' War: Reflections on Social History"
• 1979 — Dr. Thomas Barnes
  "Legal History: Does It Have a Past? Does It Have a Future?"
• 1978 — Dr. Michael Kammen
  "The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination"
• 1977 — Dr. Oron Hale
  "Administration of Occupied Territories After World War II"
• 1976 — Dr. Willie Lee Rose
  "Domesticating Domestic Slavery"
• 1975 — Dr. John Shy
  "Hearts and Minds in the American Revolution: The Social Impact of the Revolutionary War"
• 1974 — Dr. Roland Bainton
  "Erasmus and the Reformation"