Apr 10, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

In 1977, Dr. Gordon Perkin, a Canadian obstetrician-gynecologist, and his colleague Dr. Richard Mahoney, an expert in contraceptive development, left their jobs at the Ford Foundation. Together with reproductive health expert Dr. Gordon Duncan, a consultant to the Foundation, the three researchers formed their own non-profit organization, the Program for the Introduction and Adaptation of Contraceptive Technology (PIACT). The trio left Ford on very good terms. Their former boss, Chief Program Officer Dr. Oscar Harkavy—known to friends and close colleagues as "Bud"—helped to ensure that the Ford Foundation became PIACT's first funder and one of its most consistent early boosters. With a pledge of $92,000 in seed money from the Foundation and donated office space in Seattle, the three co-founders set to work designing novel contraceptive programs for the developing world.

Mar 15, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

"The role of women in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has been a vital one from the day the idea was first conceived," observed David Rockefeller to a small gathering in a newly dedicated gallery on the recently expanded third floor of New York's MoMA on December 7, 1987. "[And] we are here today to give thanks and praise to [an] amazing and dedicated lady who . . . since she became President of the Museum for a second time in 1972, has probably had a greater impact on the evolution of MoMA both internally and externally than any other one individual." The setting, in fact, was the dedication of a gallery designated for abstract expressionist art in whose honor the space was named, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller. Thirty years after that ceremony, thousands of patrons continue to mill through the delicately lit space, some soothed by the muted cardinal color of an outsized Barnet Newman canvas, others stirred by a Jackson Pollack oeuvre, most unaware of the singular influence of the gallery's namesake on the museum's history itself.

Feb 27, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

Hookworm disease received later attention from the Colombian government than it received in other Latin American countries, such as Costa Rica or Brazil. In those countries, the campaigns to combat hookworm were framed within a large national project and had broad support of the government before the arrival of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). Although in Colombia doctors began to study the disease in the first decade of the twentieth century, and warned early on about the risks to coffee and sugarcane plantation workers, the government did not take such warnings seriously until the 1920s.  At that time, it signed a cooperation agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to start the fight against tropical anemia.

Feb 15, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

In 1908, when James Henry Breasted published ancient copies of some Biblical texts, he hoped that one interested reader would be Booker T. Washington. Breasted wrote to Washington to bring the matter to his attention, providing him with a copy of the article and explaining its general content. At that time, Washington was preoccupied with the aftermath of an injustice done to black soldiers stationed in Brownsville, Texas, and the subsequent refusal of Theodore Roosevelt, whom Washington had formerly advised, to undo the damage to the men's reputations, careers, and futures. Nonetheless, Washington replied to Breasted the following week, expressing his polite interest in the matter and noting that although he had not had the time to acquaint himself with the ancient history of Ethiopia, he noted that many West African traditions traced their cultural heritage to "a distant place in the direction of ancient Ethiopia." Washington wondered if that "distant place" and the subject matter of Breasted's article could be one and the same. "Could it be possible that these civilizing influences had their sources in this ancient Ethiopian kingdom to which your article refers?" If Washington saw ancient "Ethiopia," that is, the southern Nile River Valley, also known as the Upper Nile, Nubia, and in contemporary political designation the Sudan, as the source of other African people's culture, Breasted would have concurred.

Feb 06, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

In 1927, the Library of Congress (LOC) started a comprehensive project of copying manuscripts related to the history of the United States and the Americas, stored in the libraries, archives and museums of several European countries. Internally referred to as "Project A", research assistants ventured out in order to select and superintend the systematic photographing of masses of documents preserved in institutional and private collections throughout Europe. Project A was financed through a substantial grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) for an initial period of seven years and resulted in over three million still images. The LOC made ample use of microphotography, a photographic technique that was not new, but subject to major improvements starting in the 1920s. These improvements concerned the camera and projector technology as well as the development of fire-resistant celluloid acetate film as a purportedly stable image carrier. Compared to manual copying and earlier forms of reproduction photography, such as Photostat duplication, the storage of visual data on light-weight and flexible 16mm, 35mm and 70mm film rolls enabled the reproduction of entire books, journals, newspapers, individual documents or bits of information.

Dec 20, 2017

Rockefeller Archive Center;

My dissertation analyzes the International Labor Organization's (ILO) postcolonial development activities in India and Indonesia based around productivity and its relationship to economic inequality. Accordingly, I zoomed in on the Ford Foundation's collections that were connected to the ILO, India, and Indonesia. Neither the Ford nor the Rockefeller Foundation had a sustained connection to sponsoring the ILO, and the documents were scant. Thankfully, Ford granted considerable funds and expert guidance to both India and Indonesia. This researcher's report will begin with an introduction to the climate of political economy and development that infused Ford's notions of manpower and political economy. It then transitions to a description of my findings for India and Indonesia. Indonesia's fractured history is well displayed by the timing of the Ford Foundation's technical assistance, in spite of the limited archival material for my dissertation. It closes with a meditation on the meaning of development, capitalism, and shifts in international political economy at the end of the twentieth century.

Dec 19, 2017

Rockefeller Archive Center;

On June 28th, 1966, the constitutional Argentinian President Arturo Illia was overthrown by a military putsch led by Lt. General Juan Carlos Onganía. The Congress elected in 1963 and all political parties were dissolved. The Rector, the Senate of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), and the Councils of most of the University Schools severely condemned the putsch, with its implied breakdown of all democratic procedures. On July 29th, the Universities were put under the direct control of the military Government and their autonomy was curtailed. That evening the Federal Police invaded the School of Exact and Natural Sciences (Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, FCEN) of UBA, brutally attacking the professors and students who had gathered and taking hundreds into police stations for several days. Similar invasions were perpetrated in the School of Architecture and in the School of Philosophy and Letters (FFyL) of the UBA. The Dean and Vice-Dean of the FCEN and the Dean of the School of Architecture were beaten. This episode, known as the "Night of the Long Sticks" (Noche de los bastones largos, or NBL) has been the object of numerous reports and studies.

Dec 11, 2017

Rockefeller Archive Center;

In 1968 the Ford Foundation (FF) approved a grant of $180,000 to Wayne State University (WSU) over a two-year period to support the American-Yugoslav Project (AYP). The grant proposal was made by Jack C. Fischer, Vladimir Mušič and Lojze Rojec to Stanley T. Gordon of the FF in order to assist the American-Yugoslav Project for Regional and Urban Planning Studies and thus to complete experimental plans for the city and region of Ljubljana. At the same time the FF grant would also continue to support interdisciplinary training in urban-regional planning methods for Yugoslav specialists.

Nov 29, 2017

Rockefeller Archive Center;

Americans played a key role in Iran's oil-based development program of the 1950s and early 1960s, both through the U.S. government's official overseas development programs and private organizations. Oil has historically been viewed as a key foundation of the Pahlavi regime of Mohammed Reza Shah (r. 1941-1979). According to Ruhollah Ramazani, following the U.S.-supported 1953 coup d'etat, "neither political consolidation nor economic rehabilitation could be envisaged" without the financial resources accrued from oil, "the backbone of the Iranian economy." Iran's oil was placed in the hands of an international consortium of oil companies through a new oil agreement with the shah's government in 1954, and annual revenues from the consortium's sale of Iranian oil abroad grew from $33 million to $338 million between 1955 and 1960. Yet oil power needed expertise to be applied effectively, and from the U.S. point of view the Pahlavi state seemed rickety and corrupt, in need of American "know-how" to turn its oil power into lasting socio-economic growth and political stability for the shah's regime.

Nov 14, 2017

Rockefeller Archive Center;

My work at the Rockefeller Archive Center evolved into a study of the making of an international community of public health experts and researchers across imperial Asia and the Pacific. My initial interest lay with the history professional associations, particularly the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine (FEATM) and the Pacific Science Association (PSA). The FEATM was established in Manila in 1908, largely through American initiative, whilst the Pacific Science Association developed out of a similar dynamic in Hawaii in 1920. In addition to fostering the exchange of ideas, research, and practices, these associations also proclaimed the goal of cultivating international understanding, fellowship, and ultimately peace through cooperation. Many of the personnel of the International Health Board (IHB) of the Rockefeller Foundation were either founders or enthusiastic participants in these associations, whilst the IHB supported many of the institutions, projects, and students across Asia and the Pacific that presented their work at their international congresses. I thus hoped to use officers diaries, correspondence, and reports held at the Rockefeller Archive Center to trace the movements and connections between health officials and scientists in Asia and the Pacific. The official publications of the FEATM and PSA promoted the goodwill of international conferences, so it was important to consult more private and confidential sources to discover what tensions and hostilities coexisted with cooperation and exchange.

Nov 13, 2017

Rockefeller Archive Center;

From the Monroe Doctrine in the first quarter of the 19th century to the Good Neighbor Policy in the 1930s, the United States has continuously sought, in a consistent, multifaceted, and persistently paternalistic and often violently interventionist fashion, to exert its economic preponderance, political leverage, and cultural sway in the Western hemisphere. In the second half of the twentieth century, this regional pattern of behavior acquired a new, more concerted, and unprecedentedly self-professed benevolent format. Cold War dynamics required an original set of policies from the Colossus of the North in order to deal with the rising demands for economic prosperity and political democracy burgeoning across Latin American nations.

Nov 02, 2017

Rockefeller Archive Center;

I am writing a global history of yellow fever aiming to interrogate the yellow fever story at the global, international, and national levels. Mark Harrison did this for a number of diseases in his recent study of commerce and contagion. Yellow fever has engendered a fund of excellent historical scholarship by Jamie Benchimol, Marcos Cueto, Ilana Löwy, Nancy Stepan, Liora Bigon, and many others. My research at the Rockefeller Archive Center examined materials created before the 1948 founding of the World Health Organization. I wanted to ask, for example, if we ought to think of yellow fever as a global disease. More precisely, when did it become that, if it did? It wasn't long ago that some of our colleagues, especially the more sociologically inclined, chanted the mantra that "All science is local!" This was in some ways a reaction to the historiography of Alexandre Koyré, a Russian émigré working in Paris who coined the term "scientific revolution." He and others enjoined historians of science to focus on theory while others claimed that quantification and replication of results constituted the heart of scientific advance.