Editors’ Note: Beth Gazley and Jennifer Alexander use an authoritarian framework to explain recent state government actions intended to restrict nonprofit activity in the US. This piece is based on a 2025 article appearing in Nonprofit Policy Forum. Unstable democracies have longstanding experience with governmental restrictions on civil society activity. Now these repressive efforts are …
Editors’ Note: Andrew Fisher shines light on a lesser-known philanthropic titan of the turn of the last century, Nathan Straus. This post is adapted from the prologue of Fisher’s recently published book, Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian (Rutgers University Press, 2026). It is reprinted with the publisher’s kind permission. I came to …
Editors’ Note: Katherine Badertscher introduces a recent article she published with Huitan Xu in The Foundation Review on “Philanthropic Archives and Legacy.” In 2024, my colleague Huitan Xu and I investigated the feasibility of creating a single “legacy library” to house archival material of individual philanthropists and foundations—a single repository for scholars, practitioners, donors and …
Editors’ Note: Carmen Rojas continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund (Simon & Schuster, 2025). John Fabian Witt’s The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America is one of the best books I’ve read about the perils and promises of philanthropy in the United States. It …
Editors’ Note: David Callahan reviews Bill Clinton’s memoir, Citizen: My Life After the White House (Knopf, 2024). When Jimmy Carter died in late 2024 at 100, many accolades focused on his decades of philanthropic work after leaving the White House. No former president is more closely associated with charitable good deeds than Carter, whose long …
Editors’ Note: Deepak Bhargava continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund. Is it possible for foundations to do more than ameliorate the bad effects of systems that are fundamentally unfair? Philanthropy is often accused of working downstream of social problems — dealing with symptoms rather than root causes. Philanthropy’s fiercest critics go …
Editors’ Note: Maggie Lemos and Guy-Uriel Charles revisit their 2018 California Law Review article on ‘patriotic philanthropy’ in the light of Trump 2.0. In 2018 we published an article in the California Law Review about a phenomenon that we called ‘patriotic philanthropy,’ a practice in which very rich individuals donate large sums of money to …
Editors’ Note: Jeffrey M. Berry, James M. Glaser, and Deborah J. Schildkraut outline the findings on the relationship between political ideology and charitable giving from their recent book, Everyday Democracy: Liberals, Conservatives, and Their Routine Political Lives (University of Chicago Press, 2025). (Project research assistant Alex Landy is also pictured on the computer screen in …
Editors’ Note: Dana Brakman Reiser reviews David Gelles’s Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away (Simon & Schuster, 2025). In debates and conversations about corporate social responsibility and social enterprise, few players enjoy the reverence accorded to Patagonia and its founder, Yvon Chouinard. Journalist David Gelles’ new … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: John Miles Branch discusses his article on the history of debates regarding the union exemption for nonprofits, recently published in Modern American History. “They want to change the world. They would also like a raise,” announced a New York Times headline in April 2023. Unions organizing nonprofit workers, like the Office and Professional … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Gizem Zencirci introduces her book, The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty (Syracuse, 2024), which recently received the 2025 Outstanding Book Prize from ARNOVA (Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action). Since coming to power in early 2000s, Turkey’s governing party, the Islamic-conservative AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Peter Kurie discusses the parallels between two American nonprofits that control major for-profit corporations: the OpenAI Foundation, on paper now the wealthiest charitable organization in the U.S., and the Hershey Trust, the subject of his 2018 book, In Chocolate We Trust. (This post has been revised to reflect greater clarity on the organizational … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: David Pozen continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025). A version of this post originally appeared on the Balkinization blog, which is conducting a forum on Witt’s book as well, with some outstanding contributions by … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: This post from Henry Farrell originally appeared on his Substack, Programmable Mutter. There are many possible stories about why American political conservatism is such an intellectual trainwreck. Here’s one. Conservatives used at least nominally to argue that it was important to protect civil society from the depredations of government, and many genuinely believed … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: This post, from John Witt, inaugurates HistPhil’s book forum on Witt’s recently published The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025), which chronicles the influence of the American Fund for Public Service, established in 1922. As Witt argues, the Garland Fund, as it … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Nicole P. Marwell and Jennifer E. Mosley discuss their new book, Mismeasuring Impact: How Randomized Controlled Trials Threaten the Nonprofit Sector (Stanford University Press, 2025). Recent scholarship has offered varying interpretations of what the appropriate function of foundations should be within a democracy. One dominant perspective highlights foundations’ contributions as drivers of social … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Benjamin Soskis reflects on two Congressional hearings held this summer scrutinizing federal funding of nonprofits and on the ways they helped to delineate right-wing antagonism to the nonprofit sector. I knew it wouldn’t exactly be a University of Chicago faculty seminar. The cheeky title of the hearing on the federal funding … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Nancy Um and Matthew Westerby introduce findings from the Scholars Data Project, hosted by the Association of Research Institutes in Art History, on residential fellowships sponsored by four leading research institutions in art history over the last six decades. Each summer, humanities scholars in the United States (and beyond) eagerly await the opening … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Jack Neubauer discusses his new book, The Adoption Plan: China and the Remaking of Global Humanitarianism, its reframing of the politics of humanitarian aid from the perspective of aid’s recipients, and what lessons that might hold for contemporary humanitarianism. Since the dismantling of USAID in early 2025, there has been an outpouring of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Jane Calderwood Norton and Matthew Harding offer an assessment of the “political purpose doctrine,” which excludes organizations whose main purpose is political from charitable status, and examine how jurisdictions across the common law world have responded to it, based on their recent article in Legal Studies, “Charities and Politics: Where Did We Go … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Ingrid Srinath asks what can the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s most populous democracy learn from each other about the shrinking civic space each is experiencing. On March 10, 2025, CIVICUS – the global civil society alliance I once led – added the U.S. to its Civic Monitor Watchlist of countries where … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Allison Tait revisits Henry Hansmann’s 1990 law review article, Why Do Universities Have Endowments?, at a moment when university endowments face unprecedented threats, elevating Hansmann’s question about their fundamental purpose. Endowments, currently under attack and facing proposals that increase the tax on them in some higher education institutions from 1.4% to 21%, have … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Michele Fugiel Gartner offers an outline of the history of foundation staff role development, adapted from an article, co-written with Tobias Jung and Alina Baluch, published in The Foundation Review (2023). In today’s polarized political landscape, philanthropy is under increasing scrutiny, from calls for greater transparency to more profound challenges about legitimacy and … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Samantha May discusses the “undocumented and unseen violence” that can be brought on by the regulation of Muslim charities as part of the “Financial War on Terror,” based on her 2021 book, Islamic Charity: How Charity Became Seen as a Threat to National Security (Bloombsury 2021). The year 2026 will mark a quarter of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Ian McShane introduces his new book, The Museum Movement: Carnegie Cultural Philanthropy and Museum Development in the Anglosphere, 1920-1940 (Routledge, 2024). The focus of Andrew Carnegie, and the foundation he established, on public libraries as agencies of personal development and civic uplift is well known. The Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY), though, … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Reflecting on the novel challenge the Trump administration now poses to civil society, David Morse reflects on the distance traveled from a White House gathering in 2003, one which defined the embrace of voluntarism by Trump’s last Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. Donald Trump’s war on the independence of the independent sector, combined … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Ellen Aprill explains why the hybrid nature of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), both a government and nonprofit entity, was at the heart of the standoff between Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and USIP officials earlier this week. The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) is the latest target of President … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: In the first of a two-part series, Michael E. Hartmann and William A. Schambra reflect on the populist New Right’s conception and relation to civil society. Generally, Republican presidents at least since Richard Nixon have positively characterized civil society and its role in American life. Recall, for example, some of the old standbys: … Continue reading
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