Topic: Education & Knowledge

1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s

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.

1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s

Early 20th Century Reforms of Medical Education Worldwide

Working to change US medical education was one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s biggest endeavors in the 1910s and 1920s, extending from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to Beijing, China.

1920s 1930s

“For Initiative and for Experiment”: The International Education Board, 1923-1938

Incorporated in 1923 with funding from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the IEB built a major scientific network in Europe and the US in only five years.

1910s 1920s 1930s

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.

1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 2000s

The Rockefeller Foundation’s 20th-Century Global Fight Against Disease

Programs designed to build public health infrastructure, eradicate disease, and increase access to healthcare have formed the core of more than a hundred years of one foundation’s strategy.

1950s

International Cooperation and Soft Diplomacy: The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center

Convenings at Bellagio have tackled global challenges of every sort, from trade and finance to public health, agriculture, and food security.

1960s

The Birth of International Agricultural Research Institutes in the Mid-20th Century

Rockefeller Foundation agriculture programs begun in Mexico achieved global reach through four major research institutes. Building them was the result of partnership.

1930s 1940s

Toward a More Robust Study of Mental Health: Rockefeller Foundation Funding for Psychiatry

Two decades of funding helped legitimize the study of psychiatry as a medical issue, not a problem of character.

1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s

The Rockefeller Foundation’s Agriculture Program in India

India was not the first country to take up the new seeds and methods developed by the Rockefeller Foundation, but the story of India’s adoption of them in the 1960s is dramatic.

1940s

Rebuilding Asia and Europe: the Rockefeller Foundation’s Role in Post-World-War II Reconstruction

Foundation policy toward reconstruction was shaped by uncertainty over Europe’s — and in particular Germany’s — future