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
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
