The Dirtbag Billionaire and the Purpose Trust

Posted on December 16, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

New Works in the Field / Nonprofit legal history / Nonprofits and Historical Research

Union Exemption: Connecting Labor and Nonprofit History

Posted on December 8, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

New Works in the Field

The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey

Posted on November 24, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

New Works in the Field

Resisting the Hierarchy of Evidence: Philanthropic Foundations and the Rise of RCTs

Posted on October 10, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

New Works in the Field

The Adoption Plan: The Politics of Aid in Modern China

Posted on August 8, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

New Works in the Field / Nonprofit legal history

Assessing the political purpose doctrine and the perennial problem of charities and politics

Posted on June 9, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

New Works in the Field / Philanthropy

From Philanthropoid to Foundation Professional: Reflecting on a Century of Staff Role Development in U.S. Private Foundations

Posted on May 16, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

Archives and Knowledge Management / New Works in the Field

Carnegie Cultural Philanthropy and the Museum Movement

Posted on May 6, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

Current Events and Philanthropy / New Works in the Field / Philanthropy and the State

Soskis on The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government

Posted on March 10, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

New Works in the Field

Consulting to Nonprofits: A Field in Transition

Posted on December 23, 2024 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 →

New Works in the Field / Nonprofit legal history

Legal Personhood and the Social Responsibility of Business: A Review of Williams’ Taming the Octopus

Posted on September 24, 2024 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Jared Berkowitz reviews Kyle Edward Williams’ Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation (Norton, 2024). Few issues unify Americans like the problem of corporate power. Those on the right rally against the “ideological agenda” of “woke” capital—corporations led by social justice crusaders masquerading as CEOs. Others, on the … Continue reading →

Archives and Knowledge Management / New Works in the Field / Philanthropy and Historical Research

Bednets, Communion Plates, Scraps of Paper: Telling Stories About the History of Philanthropy Through Objects

Posted on August 19, 2024 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Amanda Moniz introduces a recent special issue of The Public Historian, which she guest-edited, exploring material culture as a methodology for the history of philanthropy. What are your storytelling goals?, a thoughtful philanthropy professional asked not long ago. I’ve been asked versions of that question repeatedly since joining the staff of the Smithsonian’s … Continue reading →

New Works in the Field / Philanthropy

The General Purpose Foundation as a Mode of Capital

Posted on July 29, 2024 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Sam Gill provides an outline of a new theory of the general purpose foundation, adapted from a recently published article in The Foundation Review, “Why Foundations? The Theory and Strategy of the General-Purpose Foundation.” Much of the important theorizing about general-purpose foundations over the history of this strange animal in the American institutional … Continue reading →

Crowdfunding / New Works in the Field

Crowded Out: The Dark Side of Crowdfunding Healthcare and its Historical Precedents

Posted on July 12, 2024 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: The following is excerpted, with minor adaptations, from Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare by Nora Kenworthy. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright © 2024. When users consider starting a GoFundMe campaign, they are bombarded by messages of opportunity. The company has good reason to present crowdfunding as a marketplace of … Continue reading →

New Works in the Field

Aiding Ireland: The Politics of How Donors Learned to Give to Far-Off Strangers

Posted on June 13, 2024 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Anelise Hanson Shrout introduces HistPhil readers to her new book, Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy (NYU Press, 2024). On St. Patrick’s Day, 2024, a group of historians appealed to Irish Americans to agitate for humanitarian relief in Gaza, to “use their influence to avert a Famine as … Continue reading →

New Works in the Field

Creating AmeriCorps

Posted on April 9, 2024 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Catherine Milton, the first executive director of the Commission on National and Community Service (which laid the foundation for AmeriCorps), recounts the creation of the agency, the subject of her new book, Creating AmeriCorps: Bipartisanship in Action (2023). In 1991, I was sitting in my office at Stanford University, when I received a … Continue reading →

New Works in the Field

Magnificence: from Lorenzo de’ Medici to J.P. Morgan – and beyond?

Posted on February 19, 2024 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Guido Alfani explores the concept of the ideal of “magnificence” and situates it in relation to “munificence” and “philanthropy,” based on a discussion in his new book, As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West (Princeton University Press, 2023). Why was Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492) called “the Magnificent”? Because … Continue reading →

New Works in the Field / Political Scientists and Philanthropy

The Uneven Landscape of Civic Opportunity in the United States: What We Discovered While Mapping the Modern Agora

Posted on January 25, 2024 by HistPhil • 1 Comment

Editors’ Note: Jae Yeon Kim introduces the research he has conducted, along with other colleagues at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, on the uneven associational landscape of civic opportunity in the United States. I was born and raised in South Korea and came to the United States about a decade ago to … Continue reading →

Crowdfunding / New Works in the Field

How did GoFundMe become “the Giving Layer of the Internet”?

Posted on July 17, 2023 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Matt Wade recounts the growth of GoFundMe as the world’s largest giving platform, as analyzed in his recent article in the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing. Despite their enormous success in introducing millions of people to the extraordinary potential of peer-to-peer fundraising, GoFundMe has lately been having a difficult time. There is accumulating … Continue reading →

New Works in the Field

Civil society by the numbers? Nonprofits, accountability, and the creative politics of quantitative discipline

Posted on June 13, 2023 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Aaron Horvath introduces the argument behind his recent article in American Journal of Sociology, “Organizational Supererogation and the Transformation of Nonprofit Accountability.” In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the nonprofit sector experienced a crisis of accountability. News of fraud, overpaid executives, and other misdeeds fueled popular anxieties over whether nonprofits were misusing … Continue reading →