A Celebration of The Cooper Union's New Great Hall Digital Archive

For over 160 years, The Cooper Union’s Great Hall has been a bastion of free speech, social activism, education, culture, and civic engagement – a place where leaders, performers, and everyday people have convened to address the most important issues of their time. Join us to celebrate those moments again and the launch of The Cooper Union’s extraordinary new digital resource, Voices from the Great Hall, with a special one-night-only evening of performances by some of the very artists who have previously appeared in the Great Hall. 

Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning actor Sam Waterston hosts the evening, returning to the very stage where he reprised Abraham Lincoln’s famous Right Makes Might address, which Lincoln originally gave at The Cooper Union in 1860. The event will feature segments of the archive’s original recordings, brought to life with large-scale projection imagery that surrounds you. Be among the first to experience again the voices of the thinkers, leaders, and creators who helped shape our city and nation, including Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, National Organization for Women co-founder Betty Friedan, and author and activist Larry Kramer. WNYC's Kai Wright, host of The United States of Anxiety, will join us and, returning to the Great Hall stage for live encores will be Lincoln expert and author Harold Holzer. Ensembles from the New York Phil Teaching Artist Ensemble and Resistance Revival Chorus will perform.  

Register

Proof of complete COVID-19 vaccination and booster and masks required. 

Voices from the Great Hall is a free, public, online archive presenting 657 original sound and video recordings made in Cooper Union’s historic Great Hall dating back to 1941,  capturing 80 years of important conversations in American cultural, intellectual, and political life. The digital archive also includes 8,900 objects, such as photographs and fliers, related to more than 3,000 Great Hall programs dating back to 1859.