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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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
Editors’ Note: Naomi Lamoreaux continues HistPhil’s forum marking the 200th anniversary of the Dartmouth College v. Woodward decision. In 1819 the U.S. Supreme Court announced in Dartmouth College v. Woodward that a charter granted by the state to form a private corporation was a contract protected by Article I, Section 10 of the federal constitution: “No State … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: This post from Johann Neem begins HistPhil‘s online forum marking the 200th anniversary of the Supreme Court case Dartmouth College v. Woodward, a landmark decision in shaping the legal landscape of U.S. civil society. In this forum, a corps of distinguished scholars reflect on the complex legacy of Dartmouth v. Woodward, in the … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Henry Farrell reviews Alexander Hertel-Fernandez’s State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States – and the Nation. Read Hertel-Fernandez discuss his own research on ALEC and conservative “state capture” in the HistPhil forum on conservative philanthropy. A couple of months ago, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Rob O’Dell wrote … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Darren Dochuk introduces the concept of “wildcat Christianity” and discusses the relationship between evangelical Christianity, southwestern petroleum, and support of Israel, a subject addressed in his new book, Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (Basic Books). “God, Gas, and Cash,” a recent article by Alex Kane and Nashwa Bawab in … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Michael Seltzer reviews Edgar Villanueva‘s new book, Decolonizing Wealth. In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, Frantz Fanon noted what he considered to be the necessary conditions for the overthrow of colonialism: “To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Brian Mittendorf outlines the stakes of the recently filed lawsuit, Emily and Malcolm Fairbairn vs. Fidelity Charitable, and discusses how it reflects mounting concerns about the rise of donor-advised funds. The New York Times’ Paul Sullivan recently highlighted an ongoing and prominent lawsuit between a wealthy couple and their financial advisors. The lawsuit … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: In light of recent controversies over private contributions to rebuild the cathedral, recently damaged by fire, Matthew Ross discusses the long history of questions about charitable giving to Notre Dame. The billion dollars pledged to repair Notre Dame de Paris stoked a public crisis of conscience. Before the smoke had cleared over the gothic … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Closing HistPhil‘s forum on Philanthropy and the State in France, Sabine Rozier underscores the central role played by the French State in encouraging philanthropy in France. More specifically, Rozier argues that the “French philanthropic renewal in the 1980s and 1990s” was less “the expression of the awakening of a ‘civil society’ that would have … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Leslie K. Finger and Sarah Reckhow write on the changing nature of Walton family political contributions. In the 2012 election cycle, 72 percent of partisan federal and state election contributions from family members serving on the board of the Walton Family Foundation supported Republican candidates and committees. Four years later, in the 2016 … Continue reading
