Editors’ Note: John DiIulio, Jr. reflects on the philanthropic vision of his friend and colleague Michael Gerson, who died on November 17, 2022. The photo of Gerson on the HistPhil header is courtesy of White House Photo. Michael J. Gerson, best known as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a critic of President …
Editors’ Note: Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch discuss the decline of U.S. philanthropic foundation support for the humanities in higher education, based on their book The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education (Johns Hopkins, 2021). And then there were none. As the millennium unfolded, humanists have watched as funders have deserted U.S. higher …
Editors’ Note: Jeremy Levine discusses the indeterminate meaning of ‘community’ and how it shapes nonprofit organization’s place in urban policy, a major theme of his 2021 book, Constructing Community: Urban Governance, Development, and Inequality in Boston (Princeton University Press). It is impossible to understand urban policy in the United States without appreciating the role of …
Editors’ Note: The following is an adaptation of a lecture delivered in May 2022 by Olivier Zunz at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture on his book, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (Princeton University Press, 2022). When Alexis de Tocqueville, only 25 years-old in 1831, …
Editors’ Note: Claire Dunning introduces her new book, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State (University of Chicago, 2022). I first encountered the puzzle that inspired my recent book, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State, at a meeting I attended while working at The Boston Foundation …
Editors’ Note: Patricia A. Banks reflects on the significance of Black cultural patronage and diversity capital, key concepts in her new book, Black Culture, Inc.: How Ethnic Community Support Pays for Corporate America (Stanford University Press, 2022). In 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened its doors to the public. …
Editors’ Note: Ted Lechterman introduces his new book, The Tyranny of Generosity: Why Philanthropy Corrupts Our Politics and How We Can Fix It (Oxford University Press, 2021). When philosophers assess philanthropy, they tend to focus narrowly on the decisions of donors and the relationship between donors and recipients. Do individuals have a duty to give? …
Editors’ Note: Michelle Oyakawa explores the lessons behind the case studies collected in Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America (University of Chicago, 2021), co-written with Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna. A prism is a powerful instrument that can gather, focus, and project light. My co-authors and I chose prisms as a … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Dan Royles reviews Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993. This version of the review has been revised to reflect a response from Schulman. Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 is a sprawling, complicated chronicle of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Ellen Aprill introduces her research on governmental and semi-governmental federal charitable entities. A version of this post appeared on Notice & Comment, a blog from the Yale Journal on Regulation and ABA Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice. Few American taxpayers know that they can make tax-deductible charitable contributions of cash and … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Jamie Levine Daniel introduces her research, done with Fredrik O. Andersson, on expanding the definition of nonprofit organization founding, recently published in the Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research. “When is a nonprofit founded?” This seems like a straightforward question. However, the answer is anything but straightforward, because founding is a … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Jill Horwitz remembers Marion Fremont-Smith, one of the most important figures in the study of nonprofit law in the last half-century, who died on December 30, 2021. Marion Fremont-Smith died peacefully in her home of 60 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 30th, 2021. She was 95. Marion’s contributions over her long career … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Over the last year, a number of center-left and centrist journalists and political operatives have advanced a critique of progressive philanthropy from a “popularist” perspective, arguing that progressive philanthropy has promoted causes without significant support from the American public that have proved injurious to the electoral prospects of the Democratic party. This critique … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Joanne Meyerowitz examines the history of the “women in development” movement, based on material in her recent book, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton University Press, 2021). Today “empowering women” is a ubiquitous buzz phrase in both the policy and philanthropy of global … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Maribel Morey introduces her new book, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order (2021), and underscores the research methodology at the foundation of the book’s historical narrative. Earlier this month, my first book, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Peter Kaufman argues that the 1965 Carnegie Commission that led to the creation of the U.S.’s public television and radio systems can be a model for a philanthropic intervention to address our current epistemic crisis. With lies now so rampant on the Internet, television, and radio – with every printed page, moving image, … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Alejandro Portes continues HistPhil’s forum on “uncivil civil society.” I have adapted the title of this comment from the classic article by Sheri Berman, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” published in 1997. Since that time, several additional studies have documented the close relationship between German associationism and the rise … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Benjamin Márquez introduces his new book, The Politics of Patronage: Lawyers, Philanthropy and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 1967-2000 (University of Texas Press, 2021). The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) is one of the best-known Latino/a political organizations. The scope of its involvement in Latino/a politics is … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Thomas Adam highlights an important recent court case in Germany that has the potential to transform the nation’s philanthropic sector. Over the course of the nineteenth century, German civil society experienced a remarkable expansion in the absolute numbers of, and in the assets given to, foundations and endowments. Wealthy Germans created endowments that … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Emma Saunders-Hastings introduces her new article in American Political Science Review on Frederick Douglass and his political theory of ‘dirty money.’ In 1844, the newly-formed Free Church of Scotland sent a fundraising mission to the United States. It raised about £3,000, largely from southern Presbyterian donors. Abolitionists in the United States and abroad … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Kevin Butterfield continues HistPhil’s forum on “uncivil civil society.” Historians and social scientists studying the civil society of the early United States have rediscovered fears and anxieties within the much-celebrated notion of Americans as a “nation of joiners.” The emerging world of mutual aid organizations, reform societies, political clubs, and voluntary associations of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Hans Peter Schmitz, George E. Mitchell, and Elena M. McCollim introduce their research on the Giving Pledge, and analyze how one of its most prominent signatories, MacKenzie Scott, poses a challenge to the discourse surrounding philanthropy it most often advances. During the Covid-19 pandemic, MacKenzie Scott accompanied three rounds of billion-dollar donations to … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Legal scholars Sarah C. Haan and Faith Stevelman assess the significance and consequences of the recent Supreme Court ruling on nonprofit disclosure, Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. On July 1st, in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta (AFPF), a splintered Supreme Court majority invalidated California’s right, as a perquisite to in-state fundraising, … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Allison Schnable introduces Amateurs without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion (University of California Press, 2021). This is Schnable’s recently-published book examining the rise of new actors in the international development world: volunteer-driven grassroots international nongovernmental organizations. In 1968, the radical priest and social critic Ivan Illich addressed a conference of North … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Candice Delmas continues HistPhil‘s forum on “Uncivil Civil Society” with a defense of uncivil disobedience. There is a ‘crisis of civility’, we are told, an ‘epidemic of incivility.’ We must #ReviveCivility to preserve our fragile bonds in civil society. We need to break free of our online bubbles and learn to talk and … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Nancy Rosenblum continues HistPhil’s forum on “Uncivil Civil Society.” ‘Civil society’: the phrase comes with built-in praise and promise. The crowded sphere of voluntary associations standing between public political life and private affairs is defined as sociable and civil. What civic education in public schools is for children, civil society is for promoting … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Sheri Berman continues HistPhil’s forum on “Uncivil Civil Society,” revisiting her seminal article, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” in World Politics. In 1997 I published an article entitled “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” that challenged a growing consensus on the part of academic and non-academic … Continue reading
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