Editors’ Note: Over the next few weeks, HistPhil will feature several reviews of Lila Corwin Berman’s recently published The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex (Princeton University Press, 2020). Ben Ratskoff offers the first of these below. Lily Geismer follows with a review here. The climax of Lila Corwin Berman’s new monograph is the infamous fall of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Peter R. Elson and Sylvain A. Lefèvre, co-editors (with Jean-Marc Fontan) of the recently published Philanthropic Foundations in Canada: Landscapes, Indigenous Perspectives and Pathways to Change (PhiLab, 2020), introduce the themes of the new book. An examination of the history of philanthropy can take one of two paths: A celebration of growth and accomplishment, or … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Examining the historical record on Dutch mutual insurance from the sixteenth century to the present, Marco H.D. van Leeuwen suggests learning from this history. While acknowledging that mutualism might not “regain the importance it once had,” van Leeuwen suggests “it might well occupy a more prominent place. Indeed, we might well need the … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Elisabeth S. Clemens introduces themes from her new book, Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Portions of this essay are adapted from the book’s introduction. As with so many crises before, the first wave of the COVID pandemic produced a schizophrenic reaction to American … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Susan M. Chambré introduces her article, published in Social Service Review this June 2020, “Has Volunteering Changed in the United States? Trends, Styles, and Motivations in Historical Perspective.” Pushing back against leading scholarship on volunteering in the U.S. noting the advent of a “new volunteer workforce that is supposedly devoting smaller blocks of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Launching HistPhil’s forum on waqfs, Nurfadzilah Yahaya introduces her new book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020) In this presentation of Fluid Jurisdictions, Yahaya notes that: “While scholarship on the history of human generosity is haunted by discussions of altruistic ends and self-regarding motives, the specific … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: This post, by HistPhil co-editor Maribel Morey, introduces HistPhil’s forum on waqfs, which will be featured on this site for the next weeks. If Andrew Carnegie invented modern philanthropy, Bill Gates has become its global evangelist. For many HistPhil readers, including myself at times, this statement might not seem to be controversial. After … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Introducing her 2013 article, “Movement Conservatism and the Attack on Ethnic Studies,” published in Race, Ethnicity and Education, Donna J. Nicol argues that conservative philanthropy during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s targeted ethnic and gender studies because these disciplines called into question who had the right to determine what constitutes … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Anelise Hanson Shrout introduces her recent chapter-length review of scholarship on U.S. philanthropy in the Early Republic, published in A Companion to the History of U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present (ed. Christopher R.W. Dietrich) (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2020). Here, Shrout argues that: “The fact that a wide range of … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: In response to Black Lives Matter protests, #BlackInTheIvory, and nearly daily updates of leading U.S. philanthropies, nonprofits and for-profits proclaiming their allyship to the BLM movement, we have questioned what role we should and could play here on HistPhil. As a first step, we are amplifying the published works of Black scholars both … Continue reading
Editors’ Note: Benjamin Soskis reviews The Reputation of Philanthropy Since 1750 Britain and Beyond, by Hugh Cunningham. Hugh Cunningham’s new book, The Reputation of Philanthropy Since 1750 Britain and Beyond, helps to explain two conundrums related to discussions of contemporary philanthropy. The first is why, when referring to a philanthropist, do most people instantly imagine … Continue reading
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
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