Since 1858 the Great Hall of Cooper Union, located in the heart of New York City’s East Village, has played a vital role in the discussion and debate of current affairs. The Great Hall has been the venue where some of history’s most pivotal movements have taken shape, including the earliest workers' rights campaigns, the birth of the NAACP, the women's suffrage movement, and the founding of the Red Cross. The lectern of the Great Hall has served as a key pulpit for a wide range of the world’s greatest minds to strengthen their voices and inspire new movements in American society, most notably the place from which Abraham Lincoln delivered his “Right Makes Might” speech in 1860, railing against the expansion of slavery and propelling him to the presidency.

As part of an institutional initiative to reactivate this historically significant space and draw upon its rich history to promote constructive discourse, The Cooper Union, in partnership with the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, has launched Voices from the Great Hall, a project todigitize and preserve eight decades of incredible recordings and nearly 160 years of Great Hall program materials.

Dating back to the 1930s, The Cooper Union has made recordings of numerous speeches and lectures that took place on the stage of the Great Hall. The collection includes over 3,200 reel-to-reel tapes, approximately 2,000 audio cassettes, approximately 100 audio-video, and 50 vinyl recordings. Among the voices captured are poets and authors Dylan Thomas and Carl Sandburg; artist Lee Friedlander; American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead; Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Thurgood Marshall; architect Louis I. Kahn; psychologist and writer Timothy Leary; feminist, journalist, and social political activist, Gloria Steinem;political figures such as New York City mayors Ed Koch, Fiorello LaGuardia, David Dinkins, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio; NY Governors Mario Cuomo and Thomas E. Dewey; and Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. 

Over the course of this two year-project, Cooper Union will rehouse and survey the collection holdings, digitize and electronically preserve the recordings, and establish an online database for the archive of newly digitized materials. As the digitized works become accessible, they will be explored by researchers, utilized in Great Hall public programs curated to highlight how moments of our nation’s past might inform our choices for our future, and further disseminated through a Voices from the Great Hallpodcast series.