The Cooper Union

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is America’s first free college. Founded by progressive thinker, abolitionist, and inventor Peter Cooper, it opened its doors to all regardless of race, religion, gender, or social status. Its Great Hall became a bastion of free speech and progressivism, hosting major thinkers, performers, and the urgent issues of their times. Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery “Right Makes Might” speech on February 27, 1860, helped propel him to the presidency, and Clara Lemlich’s 1909 speech sparked the uprising of 20,000 shirtwaist workers. Among those who appeared there were Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Chief Red Cloud, Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Nikola Tesla, Clarence Darrow, P.T. Barnum, William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Carnegie, W.E.B. DuBois, Bertrand Russell, Margaret Mead, Orson Welles, Allen Ginsberg, Billy Joel, Philip Glass, Steven Colbert, and Presidents Grant, Cleveland, Taft, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, Clinton, and Obama. Its prominent alumni include Nobel physicist Russell Hulse, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Max Fleischer, and Freedom Tower’s Daniel Libeskind. Peter Cooper, who lived from 1791 to 1883, worked in turn as a laborer, clerk, mechanic, inventor, manufacturer, financier, philanthropist, philosopher, and presidential candidate; he built America’s first steam locomotive, invented powdered gelatin, and founded the company that laid the first transatlantic cable. Frederick A. Peterson’s design for Cooper Union’s Foundation Building was the earliest to employ rolled iron beams, and the Anglo-Italianate brownstone, built from 1854 to 1859, is a New York City landmark.

New York, New York · United States