[PDF] A Memorandum To The Officers And Directors Of American Foundations eBook

Author : Mark Dowie
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 31,95 MB
Release : 2002-08-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9780262262385

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In American Foundations, Mark Dowie argues that organized philanthropy is on the verge of an evolutionary shift that will transform America's nearly 50,000 foundations from covert arbiters of knowledge and culture to overt mediators of public policy and aggressive creators of new orthodoxy. He questions the wisdom of placing so much power at the disposal of nondemocratic institutions. As American wealth expands, old foundations such as Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Pew, and MacArthur have grown exponentially, while newer trusts such as Mott, Johnson, Packard, Kellogg, Hughes, Annenberg, Hewlett, Duke, and Gates have surpassed them. Foundation assets now total close to $400 billion. Though this is a tiny sum compared to corporate and government treasuries, and foundation grants still total less than 10 percent of contributions made by individuals, foundations have power and influence far beyond their wealth. Their influence derives from the conditional nature of their grant making, their power from its leverage. Unlike previous historians of philanthropy who have focused primarily on the grant maker, Dowie examines foundations from the public's perspective. He focuses on eight key areas in which foundations operate: education, science, health, environment, food, energy, art, and human services. He also looks at their imagination, or lack thereof, and at the strained relationship between American foundations and American democracy. Dowie believes that foundations deserve to exist and that they can assume an increasingly vital role in American society, but only if they transform themselves from private to essentially public institutions. The reforms he proposes to make foundations more responsive to pressing social problems and more accountable to the public will almost certainly start an important national debate.

Author : John Krige
Publisher : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 22,7 MB
Release : 2012-05-23
Category : History
ISBN : 3647310433

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This volume studies the links between politics and science during the 20th century, based on the example of the large US foundations. If the 20th century can be regarded in many ways as the »American Century«, then the large US foundations such as Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford played a major role in this development. And yet they weren ́t simply stooges for official US power politics. The circumstances surrounding their actions were much more complicated and made great demands of the philanthropy of the day. This volume with articles in English and German shows the course of US philanthropy in Europe in the time between the world wars and following World War II; it demonstrates how Europe became the setting for continually new versions of the postwar political and scientific landscape.

Author : Eric Thomas Chester
Publisher : M.E. Sharpe
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 11,73 MB
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 9781563245503

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This is the story of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an organisation founded by democratic socialists in the 1930s to help the victims of Facism in the post-World War II years, and its connections with the US intelligence community.

Author : Donald J. McGraw
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 641 pages
File Size : 23,93 MB
Release : 2021-01-25
Category : Science
ISBN : 3030563677

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National Science Foundation (NSF) is a unique federal agency because it supports scientific research financially, but does not engage in scientific work itself. Its history is known only in part because the NSF is a vibrant, expanding, and living entity that makes the final telling of its story impossible. Much can be learned from its beginning as well as its component parts. If the founding of the NSF in 1950 was couched in an era of physics, especially atomic physics, certainly by the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, biology was, and remains, the queen of sciences for the predictable future. This book highlights the elite status of America’s biological sciences as they were funded, affected, and, to a very real degree, interactively guided by the NSF. It examines important events in the earlier history of the Foundation because they play strongly upon the development of the various biology directorates. Issues such as education, applied research, medical science, the National Institutes of Health, the beginnings of biotechnology, and other matters are also discussed.