Harlem

Harlem occupies a unique place in the imagination of black America and the rest of the world.  For black urban life and culture, Harlem’s legendary history embodies the struggle for African-American equality; its role as the cultural capital of black America, giving birth to art, literature, music, ideas, and politics, has influenced the lives and minds of minority people worldwide.  Though it is a place on an island in a city, centered around its main artery of New York’s 125th Street yet comprising East Harlem, Central Harlem, and West Harlem, reaching north into Washington Heights and Inwood and south into Morningside Heights and upper Fifth Avenue, its influence has never been geographically confined; indeed, as David Levering Lewis, one of its greatest historians has written, Harlem is, was, and will always be as well a “place in the mind”—a “construct of culture”—“to be encountered in brownstones near Howard University in Washington, faculty houses on the Fisk University campus in Nashville, the Algonquin Hotel dining room, or on the left bank of the Seine.”

The Harlem Documentary Project launched by Intelligent Television and Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning in 2006 and supported in its early development phase by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, seeks to establish a vibrant, open, “living” repository of audiovisual assets about Harlem—its history, politics, and culture—building a peerless and profoundly valuable source for a range of teaching and learning materials about New York, African American history, American history, and world culture. 

The project has seven fundamental characteristics: 

• It will build upon the faculty, staff, and library collections of Columbia University and leverage over $3 million invested in Columbia University’s acquisitions and productions of learning resources related to Harlem and African American culture.

• It will involve educational and cultural institutions throughout Harlem as well as other New York institutions concerned with the history and documentation of the city and its most famous neighborhood.

• It will overcome traditional barriers to open access—the technological, legal, financial, organizational barriers—facing institutional repository and educational initiatives of this kind.

• It will draw upon and support the work of many educational institutions—including Washington University in St. Louis, with 35,000 items (including over 1,000 hours of film and video) in its Henry Hampton collection;

• It will involve newly emergent corporate stakeholders in culture and education today. 

• It will form the foundation of an experimental, innovative, multidisciplinary, multiyear course at Columbia University.

• It will take advantage of both new and traditional distribution opportunities from partners as diverse as university presses, national public radio, and major museums.

The Harlem Documentary Project will be informed by the work of historians, educators, technologists, information scientists, producers, and publishers, chief among them Manning Marable, professor of history, political science, and public policy at Columbia University and founding director of the university’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies.  In the most recent of his 19 published books, Living Black History, Marable writes of the importance of “an honest interaction with the raw materials of the past,” the need “to engage the problems of how black history can be both lost and sustained,” and the new opportunity that has arisen to reconstruct the hidden and fragmented past with “a multidisciplinary methodology employing the tools of oral history, photography, film, ethnography, and multimedia digital technology”—what Marable calls “living history.” Living history empowers and builds new legacies; through dynamic approaches to the past—including direct challenges to what John Michael Vlach has called “the flawed ideal of the conflict-free history that is presented in so many of our classrooms”—“individuals can acquire a greater sense of becoming ‘makers’ of their own history.”

For more information, see: http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/harlemarchive/