Results by title

To her contemporaries Amy Brown Lyman was a leader, admired for her dynamic personality, her inspiring public addresses, and especially for her remarkable vision of what Mormon women in the Relief Society could achieve. Yet today her name is barely known. This volume brings her work to light, showing how the accomplishments of Lyman and her peers benefitted their own and subsequent generations.

Placing Lyman’s story within a local and national context, award-winning author Dave Hall examines the roots and trajectory of Mormon women’s activism. Born into a polygamist family, Lyman entered the larger sphere of public life at the time when the practice of polygamy was ending and Mormonism had begun assimilating mainstream trends. The book follows her life as she prepared for a career, married, and sought meaning in a rapidly changing society. It recounts her involvement in the Relief Society, the Mormon women’s charity group that she led for many years and sought to transform into a force for social welfare, and it considers the influence of her connections with national and international women’s organizations. The final period of Lyman’s life, in which she resigned from the Relief Society amidst personal tragedy, offers insight into the reasons Mormon women abandoned their activist heritage for a more conservative role, a stance that is again evolving.

Winner of the Mormon History Association's Best First Book Award.

Virtually unknown outside of her adopted hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Jane Edna Harris Hunter was one of the most influential African American social activists of the early-to mid-twentieth century. In her autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer, Hunter presents an enlightening two-part narrative that recollects her formative years in post-Civil War South and her activist years in Cleveland. First published in 1940, Hunter’s autobiography recalls a childhood filled with the pleasures and pains of family life on the former plantation where her ancestors had toiled, adventures and achievements in schools for African American children, tests and trials during her brief marriage, and recognition and respect while completing nursing training and law school. When sharing the story of her life as an activist, Hunter describes the immense obstacles she overcame while developing an interracial coalition to support the Phillis Wheatley Association and nurturing its growth from a rented home that provided accommodation for twenty-two women to a nine-story building that featured one hundred and thirty-five rooms.   
This new and annotated edition of A Nickel and a Prayer includes the final chapter, “Fireside Musings,” that Hunter added to the second, limited printing of her autobiography and an introduction that lauds her as a multifaceted social activist who not only engaged in racial uplift work, but impacted African American cultural production, increased higher education opportunities for women, and invigorated African American philanthropy. This important text restores Jane Edna Harris Hunter to her rightful place among prominent African American race leaders of the twentieth century.

Since the dawn of the republic, faith in social equality, religious freedom, and the right to engage in civic activism have constituted our national creed. In this bracing history, Kathleen D. McCarthy traces the evolution of these ideals, exploring the impact of philanthropy and volunteerism on America from 1700 to 1865. What results is a vital reevaluation of public life during the pivotal decades leading up to the Civil War.

The market revolution, participatory democracy, and voluntary associations have all been closely linked since the birth of the United States. American Creed explores the relationships among these three institutions, showing how charities and reform associations forged partnerships with government, provided important safety valves for popular discontent, and sparked much-needed economic development. McCarthy also demonstrates how the idea of philanthropy became crucially wedded to social activism during the Jacksonian era. She explores how acts of volunteerism and charity became involved with the abolitionist movement, educational patronage, the struggle against racism, and female social justice campaigns. What resulted, she contends, were heated political battles over the extent to which women and African Americans would occupy the public stage.

Tracing, then, the evolution of civil society and the pivotal role of philanthropy in the search for and exercise of political and economic power, this book will prove essential to anyone interested in American history and government.

In this revised and enlarged edition of his classic work, Robert H. Bremner provides a social history of American philanthropy from colonial times to the present, showing the ways in which Americans have sought to do good in such fields as religion, education, humanitarian reform, social service, war relief, and foreign aid. Three new chapters have been added that concisely cover the course of philanthropy and voluntarism in the United States over the past twenty-five years, a period in which total giving by individuals, foundations, and corporations has more than doubled in real terms and in which major revisions of tax laws have changed patterns of giving. This new edition also includes an updated chronology of important dates, and a completely revised bibliographic essay to guide readers on literature in the field.

"[This] book, as Bremner points out, is not encyclopedic. It is what he intended it to be, a pleasant narrative, seasoned with humorous comments, briefly but interestingly treating its principal persons and subjects. It should serve teacher and student as a springboard for further study of individuals, institutions and movements."—Karl De Schweinitz, American Historical Review

"[American Philanthropy] is the starting point for both casual readers and academic scholars. . . . a readable book, important beyond its diminutive size."—Richard Magat, Foundation News

Charity is an economic act. This premise underlies a societal transformation—the merging of religious and capitalist impulses that Mona Atia calls “pious neoliberalism.” Though the phenomenon spans religious lines, Atia makes the connection between Islam and capitalism to examine the surprising relations between charity and the economy, the state, and religion in the transition from Mubarak-era Egypt.

Mapping the landscape of charity and development in Egypt, Building a House in Heaven reveals the factors that changed the nature of Egyptian charitable practices—the state’s intervention in social care and religion, an Islamic revival, intensified economic pressures on the poor, and the subsequent emergence of the private sector as a critical actor in development. She shows how, when individuals from Egypt’s private sector felt it necessary to address poverty, they sought to make Islamic charities work as engines of development, a practice that changed the function of charity from distributing goods to empowering the poor. Drawing on interviews with key players, Atia explores the geography of Islamic charities through multiple neighborhoods, ideologies, sources of funding, projects, and wide social networks. Her work shifts between absorbing ethnographic stories of specific organizations and reflections on the patterns that appear across the sector.

An enlightening look at the simultaneous neoliberalization of Islamic charity work and Islamization of neoliberal development, the book also offers an insightful analysis of the political and socioeconomic movements leading up to the uprisings that ended Mubarak’s rule and that amplified the importance of not only the Muslim Brotherhood but also the broader forces of Islamic piety and charity.

Alongside the architectural splendor and intellectual brilliance of early Renaissance Florence there existed a second world of poverty, misery, social despair, and child abandonment. The Ospedale degli Innocenti (Hospital of the Innocents), designed and built between 1419 and 1445 by the renowned architect Filippo Brunelleschi, united these disparate worlds. Christian charity and compassion, as well as the humanist commitment to social perfection, family values, and love for children, were intertwined with a civic pride in which charity curried God's favor and invoked God's blessings on the city's fortunes.

Based on a close and attentive reading of archival material from the hospital and from the Florentine State Archives, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence both chronicles the concerns and ambivalence of parents who abandoned children and follows the lives of the hospital's inhabitants from childhood to death. The book also demonstrates how hospital officials deliberately duplicated the structure and values of the Florentine family within the hospital walls. Gavitt's research shows that early modern foundling hospitals were not charnel houses where parents knowingly and impersonally abandoned their unwanted children to certain death. Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence provokes reflection on the contrast between our own views on the care of homeless children and those of the Italian Renaissance.

Winner of the Society for Italian Historical Studies 1988 Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript.

    Using the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage as a window through which readers
        can see the start of profound social and economic changes in early modern
        Amsterdam, Civic Charity in a Golden Age explores the connections
        between the developing capitalist economy, the functioning of the government,
        and the provision of charitable services to orphans in Amsterdam during
        the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of the city's greatest
        prosperity and subsequent decline.
      Anne McCants skillfully interprets details of the orphanage's expenditures,
        especially for food; its population; the work records of those who were
        reared there; and the careers of the regents who oversaw it. The establishment
        of the orphanage itself was called for by the changing economic needs
        of rapidly expanding commercial centers and the potential instability
        of a government that depended on taxes from a large, politically powerless
        segment of the population.
 
 

Believing that charity inadvertently legitimates social inequality and fosters dependence, many international development organizations have increasingly sought to replace material aid with efforts to build self-reliance and local institutions. But in some cultures—like those in rural Uganda, where Having People, Having Heart takes place—people see this shift not as an effort toward empowerment but as a suspect refusal to redistribute wealth. Exploring this conflict, China Scherz balances the negative assessments of charity that have led to this shift with the viewpoints of those who actually receive aid.
           
Through detailed studies of two different orphan support organizations in Uganda, Scherz shows how many Ugandans view material forms of Catholic charity as deeply intertwined with their own ethics of care and exchange. With a detailed examination of this overlooked relationship in hand, she reassesses the generally assumed paradox of material aid as both promising independence and preventing it. The result is a sophisticated demonstration of the powerful role that anthropological concepts of exchange, value, personhood, and religion play in the politics of international aid and development.

“Diversity” has become a mantra in corporate boardrooms, higher education, and government hiring and contracting. In Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity, Jiannbin Lee Shiao explains the leading role that large philanthropies have played in establishing diversity as a goal throughout American society in the post–civil rights era. By creating and institutionalizing diversity policies, these private organizations have quietly transformed the practice of affirmative action. Shiao describes how, from the 1960s through the 1990s, philanthropies responded to immigration, the recognition of nonblack minority groups, and the conservative backlash against affirmative action. He shows that these pressures not only shifted discourse and practice within philanthropy away from a binary black-white conception of race but also dovetailed with a change in its mission from supporting “good causes” to “identifying talent.”

Based on three years of research on the racial and ethnic priorities of the San Francisco Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation, Shiao demonstrates the geographically uneven impact of the national transition to diversification. The demographics of the regions served by the foundations in San Francisco and Cleveland are quite different, and paradoxically, the foundation in Cleveland—which serves an area with substantially fewer immigrants—has had greater institutional opportunities for implementing diversity policies. Shiao connects these regional histories with the national philanthropic field by underscoring the prominent role of the Ford Foundation, the third largest private foundation in the country, in shaping diversity policies. Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity reveals philanthropic diversity policy as a lens through which to focus on U.S. race relations and the role of the private sector in racial politics.

Today’s celebrity charity work has deep historical roots. In the 1880s and 1890s, the stars of fin-de-siècle London’s fashionable stage culture—particularly the women—transformed theatre’s connection with fundraising. They refreshed, remolded, and reenergized celebrity charity work at a time when organized benevolence and women’s public roles were also being transformed. In the process, actresses established a model and set of practices that persist today among the stars of both London’s West End and Hollywood.

In the late nineteenth century, theatre’s fundraising for charitable causes shifted from male-dominated and private to female-directed and public. Although elite women had long been involved in such enterprises, they took on more authority in this period. At the same time, regular, high-profile public charity events became more important and much more visible than private philanthropy. Actresses became key figures in making the growing number of large and heavily publicized fundraisers successful. By 1920, the attitude was “Get an actress first. If you can’t get an actress, then get a duchess.” Actresses’ star power, their ability to orchestrate large events quickly, and their skill at performing a kind of genteel extortion made them essential to this model of charity. Actresses also benefited from this new role. Taking a prominent, public, offstage position was crucial in making them, individually and collectively, respectable professionals.

Author Catherine Hindson reveals this history by examining the major types of charity events at the turn of the twentieth century, including fundraising matinees, charity bazaars and costume parties, theatrical tea and garden parties, and benefit performances. Her study concludes with a look at the involvement of actresses in raising funds for British soldiers serving in the Anglo-Boer War and the First World War. 

Political, intellectual, and academic discourse in the United States has been awash in political correctness, which has itself been berated and defended -- yet little understood. As a corrective, Nelson and Greene look at a more general process: adopting political positions to enhance one's reputation for trustworthiness both to others and to oneself.

Phillip Nelson and Kenneth Greene are Professors of Economics in the Department of Economics at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

The philanthropic landscape is changing dramatically as a new generation of wealthy donors seeks to leave its mark on the public sphere. Peter Frumkin reveals in Strategic Giving why these donors could benefit from having a comprehensive plan to guide their giving. And with this thoughtful and timely book, he provides the much-needed framework to understand and develop this kind of philanthropic strategy. 

After listening for years to scores of individual and institutional funders discuss the challenges of giving wisely, Frumkin argues here that contemporary philanthropy requires a thorough rethinking of its underlying logic. Philanthropy should be seen, he contends, as both a powerful way to meet public needs and a meaningful way to express private beliefs and commitments. He demonstrates that finding a way to simultaneously fulfill both of these functions is crucial to the survival of philanthropy and its potential to support pluralism in society. And he goes on to identify the five essential elements donors must consider when developing a philanthropic strategy—the vehicle through which giving will flow, the way impact will be achieved, the level of engagement and profile sought, the time frame for giving, and the underlying purpose of the gift. Frumkin’s point is that donors must understand strategic giving as the integration of these five critical dimensions to giving. 

Essential reading for donors, researchers, and anyone involved with the world of philanthropy, Strategic Giving provides a new basis for understanding philanthropic effectiveness and a promising new way for philanthropy to achieve the legitimacy that has at times eluded it.

    Research reveals a clear connection between the legal and social status of the Jews in Palestine in the 18th century and their ties with the Diaspora. The Jews who had immigrated to Palestine in that period were mostly poor and elderly. The country was economically backward and politically unstable, which made it impossible for the immigrants to support themselves through productive work. Therefore they lived off the contributions of their brethren overseas. Taxes and fees imposed by the Ottoman rulers increased the financial desperation of the Jews in Palestine. Prohibitions against young unmarried immigrant men and women made for an unstable population largely of old men, many of whom died shortly after immigrating. Families succumbed to disease, earthquakes, and famine, but in the face of these problems, the Jewish communities in Palestine persevered.

This accessible study examines all the major elements of the nonprofit sector of the economy of the United States —health services, educational and research institutions, religious organizations, social services, arts and cultural organizations, and foundations—describing the institutions and their functions, and then exploring how their benefits are distributed across various economic classes. The book's findings indicate that while few institutions serve primarily the poor, there is no evidence of a gross distribution of benefits upward toward the more affluent. The analysis of this data makes for a book with profound implications for future social and tax policy.

As grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller Sr. and son of philanthropist John D. Jr., Winthrop Rockefeller was born into one of the most affluent and influential families in the world. But he was a nonconformist and often felt isolated from the rest of his family. Still, he amazed many when he left the New York elite for a farm in rural Arkansas, where he would ultimately serve two terms as governor and create a philanthropic legacy all his own. In Winthrop Rockefeller, Philanthropist, John L. Ward draws from his years as Rockefeller’s speech writer and campaign advisor to create a remarkably readable and comprehensive narrative. Ward provides valuable insights into Rockefeller’s complicated relationships with his father and brothers and convincingly argues that Rockefeller’s extraordinarily innovative approach to philanthropy changed the way Arkansas was viewed by its citizens and by the rest of the world. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in twentieth-century philanthropy.