Founded in 2015, HistPhil is a web publication on the history of the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, with a particular emphasis on how history can shed light on contemporary philanthropic issues and practice. In founding and editing this blog, we hope to foster humanistically oriented discussion and debate on the sector and to bring together scholars, nonprofit practitioners, and philanthropists in common dialogue on the past, present, and future of philanthropy. For more on the vision and motivation behind HistPhil, please see the opening post. And if you would like to pitch a blog post idea, please feel free to contact us via email (historyofphilanthropyblog@gmail.com) or Twitter (@HistPhil).

-Benjamin Soskis, Maribel Morey, and Stanley N. Katz, co-founders and editors of HistPhil.

Editors’ Bios: 

Benjamin (@BenSoskis) is a Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. He is a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Philanthropy; his writing on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector has also appeared in the Washington Post, The Atlantic online, the New Yorker.com, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and the American Prospect. He is the co-author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song that Marches On (Oxford, 2013), and the co-author (with Stanley Katz) of Looking Back at 50 Years of U.S. Philanthropy (Hewlett Foundation, 2016). He is also a consultant for the history of philanthropy program of the Open Philanthropy Project, which from 2015-2016 funded his work on this blog. His work on HistPhil is currently being supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Maribel (@MaribelMorey1) is a historian of U.S. philanthropy and the social sciences, and executive director at the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences. Established in the summer of 2020, the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences centers knowledge produced by Global Majority scholars in the social sciences and neighboring fields around the world. During the 2019-20 academic year, Maribel was International Visiting Professor of Philanthropy at ESBH in Stockholm, Sweden, and before that, assistant professor of history at Clemson University. Her first book, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order, was published in 2021 with The University of North Carolina Press. For more information on Maribel, please go to http://www.maribelmorey.com.

Stanley was originally trained in early American history, but has since moved on to study the history of philanthropy in the United States. Currently a member of the faculty at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, he has also taught at Harvard, Wisconsin and Chicago.  His work on philanthropy began in the 1970s in collaboration with Barry D. Karl of the University of Chicago. Oft-cited examples of their collaboration include “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” Daedalus (1987) and “The American Private Philanthropic Foundation and the Public Sphere 1890-1930,” Minerva (1981). Now he works with two former students! For further information on Stanley, please go to http://www.princeton.edu/~snkatz/.