Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History.

Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History. Edited by Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie. (Cambridge and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 467. $40.00, ISBN 0-521-81989X.) This collection of essays is intended to synthesize scholarship devoted to the history of philanthropy during the fifteen years since Robert H. Bremner updated his canonical American Philanthropy (Chicago, 1960; rev. ed. 1988). The essays analyze the evolution of giving from seventeenth-century Puritan charity to post-World War II organized philanthropy. In addition, they place charitable and philanthropic work within a variety of contexts ranging from Scottish common sense philosophy to women's political culture to the Cold War and Third World economic development. In so doing these papers offer a corrective to the "self-inflicted marginality" of professional historians to philanthropic studies (p. 3). Of particular interest to historians of the South will be Roy E. Finkenbine's "Law, Reconstruction, and African American Education in the Post-Emancipation South." Finkenbine argues that philanthropic supporters of African American education helped maintain white supremacy in the South by promoting industrial education and by refusing to grant funds to educators who challenged racial segregation. He describes industrial education as a curriculum that featured remedial vocational skills in combination with training in Christian morality designed to prepare students for a subordinate role in southern society. He concludes that, although philanthropic trustees did not intend industrial education to lead to the overthrow of racial segregation, many recipients of some type of philanthropic aid, including W. E. B. Du Bois, later became leaders in the civil rights movement. These essays offer the nonspecialist a primer in the history of philanthropy and the specialist potentially new ways of analyzing and discussing philanthropy in American history. [DAVID L. DAVIS, Rice University]