RE:source is a publication of the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), where a team of archivists, educators, and historians share stories, photo essays, timelines, educational resources, and updates on new research in RAC collections.

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Just published

New Research

New Research: Bat Echolocation, Women’s Reproductive Rights, Tropical Medicine, and Blanchette Rockefeller

In our New Research series, we highlight recently published reports written by researchers who have received RAC travel stipends to pursue their studies in our archival collections.  In this edition of the series, the authors have studied materials in a number of collections of personal papers.  They include the papers of Donald R. Griffin, Joan…


Women Work for Women

Issues in Philanthropy

The Fairy Godmothers of Women’s Studies

Moving scholarship by and about women from margin to center.

Medicine & Public Health

The Women Pioneers of Global Nursing Education Who Built the Rockefeller Foundation Program

A massive program in nursing education extended to 53 schools across the globe. But it never became a top priority of the foundation that supported it.

Issues in Philanthropy

Centering Women’s Rights in the Population Field: The Ford Foundation and Sexual Health in the 1990s

A 1994 meeting moved women’s empowerment front and center for grantmaking in global population.


The Complicated History of American Philanthropy and Race

Race & Social Justice

Black Education and Rockefeller Philanthropy from the Jim Crow South to the Civil Rights Era

Applying a vast fortune to the American race problem, but with decades of false assumptions and well-intended approaches that fell short.

Elementary children of diverse ethnic backgrounds get ready to go inside their school, two hold hands
Race & Social Justice

Can Data Drive Social Change? Tackling School Segregation with Numbers

In the years before Brown v. Board, a philanthropic fund hoped research and data would turn the tide on attitudes toward segregation.

History of Philanthropy

Timeline: A Century of American Philanthropy’s Engagement with Race and Racism

Delving into a century of philanthropic engagement with race, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era.

Archives and Libraries

Documenting Injustice: Recording the Histories of the Japanese American Incarceration

The origins and legacy of a research project conducted in the American concentration camps for Japanese Americans.

Race & Social Justice

Photo Essay: Supporting Minority Enterprise in the late 1960s

In 1968, the Ford Foundation began to make social investments using a new tool borrowed from the for-profit world, the Program-Related Investment.

Race & Social Justice

“Highest Standards”: Elite Philanthropy and Literary Black Voices during the Civil Rights Era

Against a backdrop of white, establishment concepts of literary excellence, one foundation struggled to appreciate Black voices.

Issues in Philanthropy

Funding a Social Movement: The Ford Foundation and Civil Rights, 1965-1970

A story recounting many accusations, from rigged elections to the meddling of big private money in grassroots organizing.


Global Engagement

Medicine & Public Health

Philanthropy’s Fight Against Tuberculosis in World War I France

What does it take to control the outbreak of a deadly disease?

Global Engagement

Ping-Pong Diplomacy: NGOs and International Relations

When a friendly interaction unexpectedly emerged between American and Chinese table tennis players, one nonprofit seized the opportunity to support broader cultural diplomacy.

Peace & Conflict

The Rockefeller Foundation’s Role in Creating the Atomic Bomb

In the aftermath, Foundation staff struggled to rectify their organization’s involvement with this weapon of mass destruction.

"Action shot of the Dictionary staff. Korean Language Research Society, Seoul, Korea." - caption on the back of the photograph
Cultural Preservation

Saving a Language: The Korean Dictionary Comes to Life Against Tough Odds

What might appear to be a simple publication project came to fruition only after a decade of political upheaval, cultural repression, war, and Rockefeller Foundation support.

Social Sciences

Building Global Understanding: Area Studies, Language, and History

Encouraging cross-cultural knowledge in an interconnected postwar world by shaping new interdisciplinary programs and retooling traditional academic fields.

Medicine & Public Health

Rockefeller Philanthropy and Population-Related Fields

As the scarcity of global resources became increasingly worrisome in the 20th century, these organizations more boldly approached work in population and family planning.

Medicine & Public Health

Eradication or Control? The Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Anti-Malaria Campaigns

A foundation set on eradicating mosquito-born diseases had to accept that disease control was good enough.