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: 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
The Fairy Godmothers of Women’s Studies
Moving scholarship by and about women from margin to center.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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

Philanthropy’s Fight Against Tuberculosis in World War I France
What does it take to control the outbreak of a deadly disease?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.