Editors’ Note: The following is an interview between HistPhil co-editor Maribel Morey and the Berggruen Institute’s Vice President of Programs, Nils Gilman, which took place over email this week. An intellectual historian by training and author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2004), Gilman discusses how his orientation as a historian has shaped …
Editors’ Note: Eric John Abrahamson continues HistPhil‘s forum marking the 50th anniversary of the Tax Reform Act of 1969. In 1969, Texas Rep. Wright Patman and other members of Congress believed that a significant number of donors who created private foundations had little interest in philanthropy. Faced with high estate tax rates that would force …
Editors’ Note: HistPhil takes a brief break from our forum on the Tax Reform Act of 1969 for a post by Thomas Adam complicating the historical association between the growth of democracy and the surging of civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville’s dictum that Americans formed associations for addressing social problems while the French and English …
Editors’ Note: Karen Ferguson adds her perspective to HistPhil‘s forum on the Tax Reform Act (TRA) of 1969. The controversy surrounding the campaign to decentralize the New York City school system in 1968, and especially the pilot project in Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood, helped fuel Congressional opposition to philanthropic activism that saw expression in the …
Editors’ Note: Ellen Aprill continues HistPhil‘s forum marking the 50th anniversary of the Tax Reform Act of 1969 with a post on the constitutionality of private foundation excise taxes. This post is adapted from an article that will be published in the spring issue of Pittsburgh Tax Review, based on papers presented to a symposium …
Editors’ Note: Lila Corwin Berman continues HistPhil’s (slightly dilatory) forum marking the 50th anniversary of the Tax Reform Act of 1969 with a contribution explaining how the Act paved the way for the spectacular rise of donor-advised funds. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Congress worried about the unchecked private power that philanthropic entities could hold …
Editors’ Note: 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the Tax Reform Act of 1969 (TRA), the most significant package of legislative reforms directed at the philanthropic sector in recent memory. We missed the actual semi-centennial, but there’s no reason to think that philanthropic reform will be any less important a topic to consider in 2020 …
Editors’ Note: Building upon his article in the latest issue of the Journal of Latin American Studies, “La gran dama: Science Patronage, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Social Sciences in the 1940s,” Álvaro Morcillo Laiz considers U.S. foundations’ funding of education, the elaboration of statistics, and human rights activism in Latin America as producing public … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: HistPhil is happy to share with our readers a remarkable primary source document, an unpublished essay by Robert Payton, the founding director of the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, on the philanthropy scholar Peter Dobkin Hall, and on the personal and professional difficulties Hall encountered in developing a career as a critic … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Rachel Wimpee and Elizabeth Berkowitz, historians in the Research & Education division of the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), introduce the RAC’s latest project, Re:source, a new digital storytelling platform focused on philanthropic history. We at HistPhil give Re:source a hearty welcome (its initial postings have been superb) and encourage our readers to check … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Gara LaMarche reflects on lessons learned from leadership positions at two of the nation’s largest foundations, Open Society Foundations and the recently sunset Atlantic Philanthropies. I’ve been helping foundations and rich individuals redistribute their wealth to non-profits and social movements for nearly twenty-five years, and almost all of that time there has been … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: David A. Hollinger calls for scholars, and especially scholars of philanthropy, to engage with the history of missionaries and mission work in the United States. He makes his case in part based on his experience working on one of his recent books, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Garrett M. Broad reviews Janet M. Davis’s The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2016). Among those who identify as members of the animal rights community in the United States, religion is rarely a motivating factor for activism. Quite the contrary, animal rights activists are … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Robert S. Taylor introduces his “competitive model of public charity,” which he argues satisfies the imperatives of the republican intellectual tradition and which he outlined in a recent article in the Journal of Political Philosophy. Over the centuries, the republican intellectual tradition has focused on limiting domination of some citizens by others—be they … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: In anticipation of “An American Dilemma for the 21st Century” conference at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in NYC next Wednesday (where she will be presenting), HistPhil co-editor Maribel Morey encourages here on HistPhil some dialogue on the relative constraints and freedoms of the funder-grantee relationship, a topic of mutual … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Kathleen D. McCarthy reviews Melinda Gates’s The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World (New York: Flatiron Books, 2019). Melinda Gates’s The Moment of Lift, is a feminist Gospel of Wealth for the 21st century. While Andrew Carnegie’s much-cited 1889 essay, “Gospel of Wealth,” issued a clarion call to his fellow … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: The organizers of a new research initiative in Jewish philanthropy announce its inauguration. In a newly published study that draws on the first comprehensive data set of U.S.-based Jewish philanthropic organizations, Hanna Shaul Bar Nissim and Mathew Brookner show that such organizations gave more than $46 billion in grants in the period between … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Heather D. Curtis reviews David P. King‘s God’s Internationalists: World Vision and the Age of Evangelical Humanitarianism. King introduced his work to HistPhil readers earlier this week. Recently, I attended a Protestant church service on “Hope Sunday.” After watching a professional video that documented the Evangelical Covenant Church’s work in the Democratic Republic of Congo … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: David P. King discusses the history of World Vision, the subject of his new book, God’s Internationalists: World Vision and the Age of Evangelical Humanitarianism. Heather Curtis will offer a review of the book on HistPhil later this week. In twentieth-century histories of philanthropy, religion rarely makes a major appearance. Of course, almost … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: In the last several months, several of the Democratic candidates for president have proposed national service plans. Scott Moore discuses what we can learn from the history of such schemes. This past March, South Bend Mayor and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg became the latest in a long line of American political leaders to … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Cynthia Gibson, one of the leading experts on participatory philanthropy, explains why funders who question whether a participatory approach is consistent with philanthropic practice might want to consult the sector’s past. The material in this post is adapted from a number of sources, including Cynthia Gibson, Participatory Grantmaking: Has Its Time Come? (New York: … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Rachel Best discusses the long history of single disease charitable campaigns in the United States, the subject of her new book, Common Enemies: Disease Campaigns in America (Oxford, 2019). In October, pink ribbons decorate everything from sneakers to buckets of fried chicken, and hundreds of thousands of people participate in walks or runs to … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: John Thelin continues HistPhil‘s forum marking the bicentennial of the Dartmouth College case. This post is an excerpt from his book, A History of American Higher Education, published as a new third edition in 2019 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. For Dartmouth College and Daniel Webster, 1819 was a very good year. It was no less than … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Jane Manners continues HistPhil’s forum marking the bicentennial of the Dartmouth College case. Dartmouth College v Woodward is, as every first-year law student knows, a contract case. Its canonical holding distinguished public corporations from private ones and established that where private corporations are concerned, a legislative charter is a contract, protected from legislative … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Mark D. McGarvie continues HistPhil’s forum marking the bicentennial of the Dartmouth College v. Woodward case. The material in this post is adapted from several previously published works by McGarvie, including One Nation Under Law: America’s Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State (2004); Law and Religion in American History: Public Values and Private … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Evelyn Atkinson continues HistPhil‘s forum marking the bicentennial of the Dartmouth College v. Woodward case. In 1853, the Supreme Court of Ohio declared that the case of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) had become “a subterfuge for fraud and a means of shielding corporations from responsibility and correction for the abuse of their corporate … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Robert Bonner continues HistPhil’s forum commemorating the 200th anniversary of Dartmouth College v. Woodward with a post on how Dartmouth College marked the occasion. Students at Dartmouth College launch the calendar year with two extravaganzas: a snowy Winter Carnival followed by a glitzy “Dartmouth Idol” talent competition. In 2019, a different sort of … Continue reading
