Kengor's C-SPAN lecture covers Cuban Missile Crisis

Television viewers can sit in on Grove City College Professor of Political Science Dr. Paul Kengor’s class at 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 18 on C-SPAN3.

Kengor, an expert on the Cold War and communism, is featured on the public affairs cable channel’s Lectures in History series, which gives viewers a front row seat in the classrooms of professors at the nation’s leading colleges and universities.

In October, a C-SPAN crew recorded Kengor as he taught a class on one of the Cold War’s hottest moments: the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Over the course of an hour, he brought the past to life for a rapt class of Grove City College students, exploring the background of the standoff and detailing how President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev handled the crisis and its resolution, much of which was secret at the time.

Kengor said he spends a couple of weeks on Cuba for his Comparative Politics course covering the entirety of the Fidel Castro era. He’s been studying the crisis for decades and incorporates his original research into his lecture.

“Probably nothing was more critical in that period from a U.S. and Cold War perspective than the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a very dangerous period of 13 dramatic days in October 1962, when nuclear war was a frightening possibility,” Kengor said.

The lecture will be replayed at midnight Saturday and again at 6:50 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 19. Viewers can watch it later online here. It will also be available as a Lectures in History podcast available the next day on CSPAN3’s website and other podcast apps.

The Lectures in History series allows C-SPAN viewers to go into college classrooms around the country on a weekly basis to hear lectures on a variety of American history topics. “Because these are real classes, they look and feel a bit different than many of our other programs, which are often talks or panels taped at public venues. Our viewers have responded positively to the series,” Logan Russell, of C-SPAN’s American History TV, said.

“We give the professors we tape a lot of leeway to pick the single class they want to feature, which leads to a good variety in the topics for the series overall,” he said. “In Paul Kengor's case, he is well known to us at C-SPAN, having appeared on the network 25 times, and he was also one of the scholars selected to take part in our 2017 survey of U.S. presidents.”

C-SPAN previously featured Grove City College’s Dr. Gillis Harp, professor of History, for Lectures in History series program in 2011.

Later this month, CSPAN3 will return to campus to record a lecture by Grove City College President Paul J. McNulty ’80, who is teaching a course on the U.S. Constitution. McNulty is a former U.S. Deputy Attorney General and senior Congressional counsel.

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