FACT: “Nearly a century after the first English settlement at Jamestown, and eighty years after the ‘pilgrims’ landed at Plymouth, there were still only two colleges in the American colonies, Harvard (founded in 1636) in the north, and William and Mary (1693) in the upper south.”

College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be
by Andrew Delbanco, Winner of the 2011 National Humanities Medal

As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience—an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers—is in danger of becoming a thing of the past.

In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich. In arguing for what a true college education should be, he demonstrates why making it available to as many young people as possible remains central to America’s democratic promise.

To help kick off the election season, we’re moving our Book Fact Fridays to Election Tuesday facts. Be sure to check in every Tuesday for a new tidbit from our great selection of politically-minded books.

FACT: “In 1907, Congress passed legislation that prohibited corporations and national banks from contributing to candidates in federal elections. This prohibition grew out of the belief that large contributions inherently corrupted politics…”

Governing America: The Revival of Political History
by Julian E. Zelizer

In recent years, the study of American political history has experienced a remarkable renaissance. After decades during which the subject fell out of fashion and disappeared from public view, it has returned to prominence as the study of American history has shifted its focus back to politics broadly defined. In this book, one of the leaders of the resurgence in American political history, Julian Zelizer, assesses its revival and demonstrates how this work not only illuminates the past but also helps us better understand American politics today.

Governing America addresses issues of wide interest, including the rise of the welfare state, the development of modern conservatism, the history of Congress, the struggle over campaign finance, changing views about presidential power, and national security. Throughout, it addresses four big questions: How have interpretations of American political history changed over time? How have taxes and budgets constrained policymakers? How have changes in the political process defined historical eras? And how have policy and politics interacted on decisions like going to war?

David Scheffer, author of the recently published ‘All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals’ will be touring Europe from 12 – 24 March, speaking in London, The Hague, Berlin, Cologne, Vienna, Budapest, Sarajevo and Brussels. While in London he will be talking at the Society for Oriental and African Studies on 12th March and at Chatham House on 13 March. Both these events are free and open to the public so please follow the links if you would like to sign up. For more detailed information on any of the other events in Europe please contact Caroline Priday cpriday@pupress.co.uk or @crpriday

FACT: “Congress’s 1819 Act Respecting Passenger Ships and Vessels (sometimes called the Steerage Act) limited the numbers of migrants traveling on any ship to two persons for every five tons of regular freight—thus creating an equation of commodities and living freight, with the added refinement of a measurable ratio. The act required ship captains to collect basic information about arriving foreigners, thus marking the beginning of U.S. efforts to count immigrants.”

Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective
by Donna R. Gabaccia

Histories investigating U.S. immigration have often portrayed America as a domestic melting pot, merging together those who arrive on its shores. Yet this is not a truly accurate depiction of the nation’s complex connections to immigration. Offering a brand-new global history, Foreign Relations takes a comprehensive look at the links between American immigration and U.S. foreign relations. Donna Gabaccia examines America’s relationship to immigration and its debates through the prism of the nation’s changing foreign policy over the past two centuries, and she highlights how these ever-evolving dynamics have influenced the lives of individuals moving to and from the United States.

Congratulations to Lawrence P. Jackson, whose book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 has won the 2012 BCALA Literary Award in the Nonfiction Category. This award recognizes excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors published in 2011. According to the BCALA press release:

“The Indignant Generation is a fascinating exploration of the development of African American literature after the Harlem Renaissance to the modern day Civil Rights Movement. Lawrence P. Jackson offers readers rare insights into the lives of key players who contributed to the breadth of writing that flourished between 1934 and 1960. From Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes to James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, Jackson highlights the unique challenges faced by the writers during the time of the Great Depression, Jim Crow, World War II and the Cold War. Dozens of illustrations and photographs enhance this stunning work that celebrates African American artistic and intellectual achievement in writing. Professor Jackson teaches English and African American Studies at Emory University.”

David Scheffer, the first US ambassador for war crimes, has recently published All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals with Princeton University Press. In the book, he discusses bringing some of the most notorious war criminals to justice. David was interviewed on BBC Radio 3 NightWaves on 25th January and the interview is now available to listen again here.

FACT: “As part of his strenuous life, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a four-volume history of the American West, three biographies, and twenty-nine other volumes, plus some 150,000 letters. Winston Churchill would author forty books. A biographer calculated that in the early twenty-first century Churchill’s words still in print numbered over eight million.”

Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War
Frank Costigliola

In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory in Europe was approaching, the shape of the postwar world hinged on the personal politics and flawed personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances captures this moment and shows how FDR crafted a winning coalition by overcoming the different habits, upbringings, sympathies, and past experiences of the three leaders. In particular, Roosevelt trained his famous charm on Stalin, lavishing respect on him, salving his insecurities, and rendering him more amenable to compromise on some matters.

Yet, even as he pursued a lasting peace, FDR was alienating his own intimate circle of advisers and becoming dangerously isolated. After his death, postwar cooperation depended on Harry Truman, who, with very different sensibilities, heeded the embittered “Soviet experts” his predecessor had kept distant. A Grand Alliance was painstakingly built and carelessly lost. The Cold War was by no means inevitable.

Margot Canaday’s brilliant book The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America has won the 2012 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award.

“The Order of the Coif is an honorary scholastic society the purpose of which is to encourage excellence in legal education by fostering a spirit of careful study, recognizing those who as law students attained a high grade of scholarship, and honoring those who as lawyers, judges and teachers attained high distinction for their scholarly or professional accomplishments.”

This is Margot Canaday’s SEVENTH award for The Straight State. Some of the other accolades include the 2011 John Boswell Prize, the 2010 Cromwell Book Prize, the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, the Gladys M. Kammerer Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies.

I am grabbing this from Phil Buchanan’s review of Philanthropy in America: A History by Olivier Zunz over at the Center for Effective Philanthropy site: http://www.effectivephilanthropy.org/blog/2012/01/seven-%E2%80%9Cnew%E2%80%9D-concepts-that-are-not-so-new-after-all-reflections-on-a-history-of-philanthropy/.

His list of not-so-new ideas about philanthropy perfectly illustrates how a historical understanding such as the one offered in Zunz’s book can inform and deepen the debates and discussions about philanthropy in the 21st century and beyond.

Reading Zunz’s book, I noticed seven examples of things that are often portrayed as new – or not done – despite the fact that this is not, historically, the case.

1. How often do you hear the lament that nonprofits never die, because the sector lacks the forces of “creative destruction” – to use economist Joseph Schumpeter’s term – that buffet the for-profit world? In a 2010 article in Harvard Business Review, Allen Grossman and Bob Kaplan write, “Apparently, Schumpeter’s cycle doesn’t operate in the social sector.” Yet, history offers evidence to the contrary. During the Great Depression, Zunz notes that “one-third of private charitable agencies in the United States disappeared” during a three-year period. (I’ve also argued that, to the extent that nonprofits have been more resistant to these forces, that’s partly the point of them – to operate outside markets.)

2. Heard a lot about “cross-sector collaboration” or, more recently, of the term “collective impact?” A Stanford Social Innovation Review article describes the concept as the “commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem” and discusses the need for a “fundamental change in how funders see their role, from funding organizations to leading a long-term process of social change.” But Zunz recounts how the earliest major American philanthropists saw their role in precisely these terms, and he cites many examples over the past century of government, foundations, nonprofits, and companies working together to address serious social problems, such as the effort to fight tuberculosis in the early 1900s. He describes the work of the Russell Sage Foundation and nonprofits to combat the disease and then notes, “Other funding partners in the fight against tuberculosis came from business, labor, and government. Life insurance companies naturally invested in reducing mortality rates among their customers.” It is likely the case that such efforts remain too rare, but there are many historical examples worth understanding.

3. Today, that work by life insurance companies on tuberculosis might be heralded as “corporate social responsibility,” “blended value,” or, in the newest term for what appears to be essentially the same thing, “shared value.” But there is nothing new about companies seeking to do social good and make a profit – or the recognition that these goals sometimes go hand in hand (although quite clearly sometimes they don’t). Zunz recounts, for example, how the insurer “Metropolitan Life paid for a major study of tuberculosis in Framingham, Massachusetts, and underwrote a large educational campaign.”

4. What about policy and advocacy work – which so often gets described as if it is a new push or something that funders historically haven’t done? This is perhaps the most powerful part of the story Zunz tells: the fact that philanthropy and public policy have been closely connected since the earliest days of institutional philanthropy and the subsequent spread of “mass philanthropy” in the U.S. a century ago. Zunz describes the evolution of the law with respect to this issue, but what is clear is that the earliest major foundations sought to influence policy, recognizing that this was a crucial way to make change. “Philanthropists have invested their resources in the greater American fight over the definition of the common good. They have taken all sides in all the partisan encounters that have divided our society and have strategically intervened in essential debates on citizenship, opportunity, and rights.” Zunz argues that this activity has “enlarged democracy.”

5. And what of the push to move beyond transactional charity to influence systems and lives on a significant scale, or to combat “root causes” of social problems? Reading press coverage of philanthropy, it would be easy to conclude that, before the Gates Foundation, no one really cared if they were making a difference with their philanthropy. But there is nothing new about the quest to make a measurable difference, as Zunz recounts. He discusses the way Julius Rosenwald pursued a strategy of improving education for blacks in the South, or the influence of philanthropy on private colleges and universities to become much more focused on scientific research – and much more secular. Zunz cites a 1907 Outlook magazine article by Daniel Coit Gilman, a founding member of the American Social Science Association and a president of Johns Hopkins University. “Gilman underscored the new philanthropy’s insistence on long-term solutions to social problems instead of temporary relief for the destitute. High among its goals was the search for root causes.”

6. How about PRIs (Program Related Investment) or the broader concept of “impact investing?” Zunz tells the story of the creation in 1967, by nine foundations, of the Cooperative Assistance Fund to invest in minority businesses. To their credit, the thoughtful present-day proponents of this kind of approach, such as Jed Emerson and Antony Bugg-Levine, are quick to acknowledge its history – but much of what is written by others seems ignorant of what has come before.

7. Finally, how many times have you heard that nonprofits don’t know how to market themselves? And yet American history includes many examples of brilliant marketing, fundraising, and education efforts led by nonprofits. Zunz describes how nonprofits mobilized mass participation and action for positive effect in the fights against disease. He also describes the successful campaigns to encourage giving that accompanied the birth of the “community chest” and the community foundation, and the “democratization” of philanthropy. Indeed, the country’s high level of charitable giving is the result of savvy marketing by nonprofits.

Does Phil hit all the examples of not-so-new ideas in philanthropy? Are there other examples of 21st-century “new” ideas that have deep historical roots? Sound off below in the comments.

We invite you to check out our new 2012 history catalog at: http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/history12.pdf

You will find books by Emma Rothschild, Sheldon Garon, Tonio Andrade, Andrei Codrescu, Jill Lepore, Jim Kloppenberg, David Scheffer and many more. New paperbacks and ebooks are also available.

The 126^th annual meeting of the American Historical Association is going on now in Chicago. We’re there at booth no. 313. Stop by to say hello and browse new books.

How did something so small and insignificant as a stamp change the world?

In an op-ed from the New York Times this morning, PUP author Olivier Zunz relates the origins of the Christmas Seals campaign and the birth of mass philanthropy in the United States. At a time of year when we are inundated by requests to give a little, give a lot, just give — this article takes on special meaning. Not only is the Christmas Seals story a fascinating, heartwarming history, but Olivier hints at the larger lessons we can draw from it, writing:

It might be worthwhile for all those who sympathize with the occupiers of Zuccotti Park and other plazas and squares around the country to learn from the example of the Christmas Seals campaign. We have no shortage of urgent causes that will benefit from the energy of the grass roots. The seals campaign showed that the 99 percent, even when feeling disenfranchised, are hardly powerless to repair the safety net — and even influence the actions of the 1 percent.

The seals in this post are shared from the complete 104-year gallery at the American Lung Association: http://www.christmasseals.org/galleries/1907-1919.html. It is fascinating to watch the themes and imagery of the seals shift and change over the years and now the Christmas Seal program is high tech. You can send an e-card with a Christmas Seal or post one on Facebook. If you prefer the low-tech version, you can still purchase Seals for 2011: http://www.shoplungusa.org/xmasseals/getseals.asp

If you are interested in the history of philanthropy in America, please check out Olivier Zunz’s new book Philanthropy in America: A History. We are pleased to offer a complimentary excerpt on our web site: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9513.pdf

Congratulations to Lawrence P. Jackson, whose book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 is picking up accolades left and right. The book has won the 2011 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, which recognizes “an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture.”

“In this magisterial narrative history of African American literature running from the end of the Harlem Renaissance to the beginning of the civil rights period, Lawrence P. Jackson expands the archive for assessing African American writing during a period that has often been reduced to protest writing. Jackson places writers into fresh contexts of cohorts (critics and editors included) and threads a clear narrative line through three heady decades jam-packed with African American authors publishing in a variety of genres and venues. Jackson is excellent on the important influence of the Communist Party, on mid-twentieth-century black literary culture, and on issues of publishing and reception. Beautifully written and rich in historical detail, The Indignant Generation should quickly become a standard work in twentieth-century African American studies and United States publishing history.”

Jackson’s work is also a finalist for the 2011 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, from the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

“The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award™ is the first national award presented to published writers of African descent by the national community of Black writers. This award consists of prizes for the highest quality writing in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry.”