Bill Clinton’s Philanthropic Legacy: An Appraisal

Posted on March 9, 2026 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: David Callahan reviews Bill Clinton’s memoir, Citizen: My Life After the White House (Knopf, 2024). When Jimmy Carter died in late 2024 at 100, many accolades focused on his decades of philanthropic work after leaving the White House. No former president is more closely associated with charitable good deeds than Carter, whose long …

Radical Fund Book Forum

A Lightning Strike of a Lineage: Six Lessons for today’s funders from the Garland Fund

Posted on February 17, 2026 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Deepak Bhargava continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund. Is it possible for foundations to do more than ameliorate the bad effects of systems that are fundamentally unfair? Philanthropy is often accused of working downstream of social problems — dealing with symptoms rather than root causes. Philanthropy’s fiercest critics go …

Current Events and Philanthropy / Philanthropy and Democracy / Philanthropy and the State / Philanthropy in the News

Reconsidering ‘Patriotic Philanthropy’ in the Second Trump Administration

Posted on February 12, 2026 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Maggie Lemos and Guy-Uriel Charles revisit their 2018 California Law Review article on ‘patriotic philanthropy’ in the light of Trump 2.0. In 2018 we published an article in the California Law Review about a phenomenon that we called ‘patriotic philanthropy,’ a practice in which very rich individuals donate large sums of money to …

New Works in the Field

Rethinking Who Really Cares: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Simple Act of Charity

Posted on January 13, 2026 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Jeffrey M. Berry, James M. Glaser, and Deborah J. Schildkraut outline the findings on the relationship between political ideology and charitable giving from their recent book, Everyday Democracy: Liberals, Conservatives, and Their Routine Political Lives (University of Chicago Press, 2025). (Project research assistant Alex Landy is also pictured on the computer screen in …

Current Events and Philanthropy / New Works in the Field / Nonprofit legal history / Philanthropy in the News

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 …

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 …

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 …

Current Events and Philanthropy / Philanthropy / Philanthropy in the News

From Chocolate to ChatGPT: What Hershey’s Century-Old Philanthropy Reveals About OpenAI’s New $130 Billion Foundation

Posted on November 13, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: Peter Kurie discusses the parallels between two American nonprofits that control major for-profit corporations: the OpenAI Foundation, on paper now the wealthiest charitable organization in the U.S., and the Hershey Trust, the subject of his 2018 book, In Chocolate We Trust. (This post has been revised to reflect greater clarity on the organizational …

Radical Fund Book Forum

Could a Garland Fund 2.0 Upend America Today?

Posted on November 3, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: David Pozen continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025). A version of this post originally appeared on the Balkinization blog, which is conducting a forum on Witt’s book as well, with some outstanding contributions by …

Shrinking Space for Global Civil Society

What is Civil Society, and why should we care?: Farrell on Gellner on the conditions of liberty

Posted on October 29, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

Editors’ Note: This post from Henry Farrell originally appeared on his Substack, Programmable Mutter. There are many possible stories about why American political conservatism is such an intellectual trainwreck. Here’s one. Conservatives used at least nominally to argue that it was important to protect civil society from the depredations of government, and many genuinely believed …

Radical Fund Book Forum

When the Tax Code (and Private Foundations) Nudged Americans Toward Nonviolence

Posted on October 27, 2025 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

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 …

Latest Entries

New Works in the Field

In the June Issues of the AHR and NVSQ

Posted on June 17, 2015 by HistPhil • Leave a comment

(Editors’ Note: In “Introducing HistPhil,” we said that we will keep track of events, articles, and books of interest to the field. This is our first blog post in that vein.) In the current issue of The American Historical Review, William I. Hitchcock reviews Bruno Cabanes’s The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924 (NYC: Cambridge University … Continue reading →

From the Editors

Introducing HistPhil: A New Blog on the History of Philanthropy

Posted on June 17, 2015 by HistPhil • 6 Comments

Modern philanthropy has long had an ambivalent relationship with its own history. On the one hand, every decade or so has brought tidings of a New Philanthropy, or sometimes even of a New, New Philanthropy, a designation that promotes a virtuous discontinuity with the giving that had marked the benighted old days. Centuries ago, such … Continue reading →

From the Editors

The Clinton Foundation in Historical Perspective

Posted on June 17, 2015 by HistPhil • 5 Comments

My friend and long-time collaborator in studying the history of the philanthropic foundation, Barry Karl, cautioned me that “historians cannot predict the future, they are not even very good at predicting the past.” Wise words, and I have tried to keep them in mind for the forty years in which I have been thinking about … Continue reading →