CUNY Digital History Archive
Andrea Ades Vásquez, American Social History Project • Center for Media and Learning
Project Website: CUNY Digital History Archive
The history of the City University of New York (CUNY)—the nation’s first urban, tuition-free public institution of higher learning and its largest urban university system—offers scholars and the public a unique and especially useful lens through which to view and consider many enduring political, social and cultural questions in American society. Faculty, staff, and students have fought to sustain the university so that it lives up to its democratic mission and the CUNY Digital History Archive aims to reflect those efforts.
The CUNY Digital History Project—which is both an archival repository of digital materials and a portal to already existing digital materials contained in archives across CUNY—aggregates these stories and materials, allowing the complexity of the historical and educational issues to be fully understood. In addition to amassing, preserving and providing access to digitized historical materials, CDHA understands the importance of providing historical context for the source materials contained in its archival collections, thus making those materials more immediately accessible and useful for students, researchers, and the general public.
CDHA is a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning; much of the work is done at the New Media Lab by faculty, staff and retirees from across CUNY as well as ASHP staff and CUNY graduate and doctoral students.
