The Activism at The New School oral history program, initiated in 2019, documents touchstone moments of activism on The New School’s campus from the perspective of students, faculty, and staff who participated. As of April 2020, interviewees include activists in the anti-Vietnam War movement; the 1996-1997 Mobilization for Real Diversity, Democracy, and Economic Justice at The New School; and campus protests in the 2000s-2010s.

The audio recordings and transcripts in this collection document lectures from a fifteen-week series on the race crisis in the United States, held in the spring of 1964 at the New School and organized by New School professor Daniel S. Anthony. The recorded speakers include Charles Abrams, Algernon D. Black, Dan W. Dodson, Milton A. Galamison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Louis Lomax, Melvin Tumin, Robert C. Weaver, and Roy Wilkins.

Open to the general public, the lectures were held in the New School auditorium at 66 West 12th Street in Greenwich Village. Topics discussed range from the impact of school integration, housing discrimination, affirmative action, the growing Black separatist movement, and motivations for racial prejudice. Dr. King opened the conference, and the recording of his talk consists only of the question and answer session following his address.

Bob Adelman (1930-2016) studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch at The New School in the 1950s and became one of the photographers regularly documenting the life of the New School in the 1970s and 1980s. Adelman also taught at the school and was one of the most well-known photographers of the Civil Rights Movement. This collection consists largely of black and white photographic prints taken for the New School for Social Research.

The collection also includes a small group of prints representing Adelman's work in documentary journalism, including photographs of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as photographs documenting life in New Orleans and Moscow, and the New York City Housing Authority.

The papers of M.S. Handler, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and United Press Association, among other news outlets, includes correspondence, photographs, draft writings, research files, and press clippings. The records date from the early 1920s through 1981, with the bulk created between 1942 and 1969.

The collection consists of audio and video recordings of events sponsored by the Rose and Erwin Wolfson Center for National Affairs at The New School. With the exception of the Center's inaugural semester in Fall 1986, the recordings document the entirety of Center's existence.