Editors’ Note: Andrew Hart reviews Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, with a particular focus on what the book might (or might not) tell us about the relationship between philanthropy and inequality. French economist Thomas Piketty’s latest book, Capital and Ideology (Capital et idéologie, 2019), arrived in English in mid-March, when people with office jobs were … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Maoz Brown details the history of outcome evaluation in the human services, summarizing an argument he recently made in the December 2019 issue of Social Service Review. The entire issue, on social work history, is worthy of attention from historians of philanthropy. It contains, for instance, important contributions on the Russell Sage Foundation-funded … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Jon Dean introduces his forthcoming book, The Good Glow: Charity and the Symbolic Power of Doing Good (May 2020). Starting with the basic premise that people tend to think positively of other people whom they perceive to be altruistic and kind, Dean argues that such seemingly charitable people are imbued with a certain … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: An early critic of philanthrocapitalism and the Gates Foundation – arguing in No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (2015) that in the age of philanthrocapitalism “[g]iving more” had become “an avenue for getting more” – Linsey McGoey introduces her newest book, The Unknowers: How Strategic … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Building upon his article in the latest issue of the Journal of Latin American Studies, “La gran dama: Science Patronage, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Social Sciences in the 1940s,” Álvaro Morcillo Laiz considers U.S. foundations’ funding of education, the elaboration of statistics, and human rights activism in Latin America as producing public … Continue reading
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: 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: 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: 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: 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
Editors’ Note: Michael Seltzer reviews Edgar Villanueva‘s new book, Decolonizing Wealth. In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, Frantz Fanon noted what he considered to be the necessary conditions for the overthrow of colonialism: “To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Evan Faulkenbury introduces his new book on the Voter Education Project, Poll Power: The Voter Education Project and the Movement for the Ballot in the American South. Without money, the civil rights movement would not have had the critical resources it needed to defeat Jim Crow at the ballot box. This may be … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: David Hammack reviews Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development, edited by Naomi R. Lamoreaux and John Joseph Wallis. For more than thirty years a growing literature has debated the origins of the market economy and the relation between the market and economic growth. Motivating this debate is the understanding, widely shared … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Nicolas Duquette highlights the history of the charitable contribution income tax deduction, in a preview of an upcoming article in Business History Review. The US charitable-contribution income-tax deduction marked its centennial in 2017. Relative to nearly every other aspect of the federal income tax, the workings of the deduction have changed little since its creation in … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Kellie Carter Jackson makes the case for a fuller scholarly engagement with black abolitionists and their “profound understanding of the idea, experience and value of violence,” the subject of her new book, Force and Freedom. John Anderson was an escaped slave who fled to Canada. On July 5, 1861 the Toronto Globe recounted the speech he … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Reflecting on her new book, co-authored with Jeffrey Henig and Rebecca Jacobsen, Outside Money in School Board Elections: The Nationalization of Education Politics, Sarah Reckhow draws our attention to Los Angeles and details a new trend among mega donors in coordinating their philanthropic giving and political contributions. Reckhow argues that this behavioral shift … Continue reading
