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
Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Benjamin Soskis reviews Tyler O’Neil’s The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government (Bombardier Books, 2025). I first heard about Tyler O’Neil’s The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government because of a small online controversy over its cover. It shows the tentacles of a giant … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Merrill Sovner adapts a 2019 report she co-wrote to address a particular timely question: how informal rules can be used to constrict civil society, focused on the examples of Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. In the current political moment in the United States, comparisons have been made to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, both … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: John Miles Branch explores the feud between two prominent mid-century libertarian thinkers, Murray Rothbard and Richard Cornuelle, as a way of understanding the contemporary right’s growing antipathy toward nonprofits writ large. On February 6, the White House published a memo entitled “Advancing United States Interests When Funding Nongovernmental Organizations” that directs agency heads … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Leah Reisman introduces some of the major themes from her new book, How Consultants Shape Nonprofits (Stanford University Press/ SSIR Books, 2024). Consultants are everywhere in the nonprofit sector. Ranging from multinational organizations like the Bridgespan Group to tiny single-person shops, nonprofits and philanthropic foundations of all kinds hire consultants to solve organizational … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Benjamin Soskis examines the place of philanthropy within the recently surging critique of “The Groups,” the term applied collectively to progressive advocacy organizations, which some have blamed for the Democrats’ November defeat. In weeks after November 5th, amidst the maelstrom of election post-mortems, an interview that journalist Ezra Klein conducted with … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Damon Circosta and Kristin A. Goss celebrate the philanthropic legacy of Joel Fleishman, their colleague at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, who passed away on September 30, 2024. Photo credit: Chris Hildreth for Duke University. Joel Lawrence Fleishman, a towering figure in the world of philanthropy, public policy, and higher education, … Continue reading
HistPhil 