Jan 17, 2019

Rockefeller Archive Center;

Colombia and the United States strengthened their trade, scientific and cultural exchanges during the 1920s. In regards to health and medicine issues, the Rockefeller Foundation played a pivotal role between 1919 and 1945, when it conducted scientific research and financed the battle against infectious diseases, above all yellow fever and hookworm. It also encouraged the development of a public health system in Colombia by creating American-inspired institutions and training health professionals.

Jan 14, 2019

Rockefeller Archive Center;

With generous financial support provided by the Rockefeller Archive Center, I was able to pay a research visit to Rockefeller Archive Center from July 20 to September 7, 2018. This was my second visit to the Center, following one in 2008, when the Center granted and financially supported my one-month-long access to its archival resources. This second visit proved to be an important one. This time I took advantage of the fact that the Center now allows archive users to take photographs. As a result, I was able to proceed with my work efficiently and made extensive use of archival material which I missed in my previous visit. This report presents a description of the important historical materials I have viewed and collected during this visit. It includes seven subjects in general, described as follows, that together constitute my research project, Modern China and Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1966).

Dec 18, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

Established on 5th July 1948, the British National Health Service (NHS) provides free-at-the-point-of-use universal health care to Great Britain's entire population. Though most industrialized countries now ensure some form of comprehensive medical coverage, the British system is structurally unusual in several ways: it does not require any form of health insurance; the government owns the overwhelming majority of the U.K.'s hospitals and clinics; and it employs a vast pool of employees comprising the world's fifth largest workforce. The service is also culturally and socially unique. It is celebrated as "the closest thing the English have to a religion" and regularly tops polls of what makes people "most proud to be British." Yet, the institution's acclaim and longevity is striking considering its scarce resources, uneven health outcomes, and the dismantling of nationalized enterprises across the world. My research asks why the NHS has survived for nearly seventy years, and, in doing so, highlights specific endurances to a postwar social democratic ethic in health care

Dec 13, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology was awarded to three scientists who studied domestic fruit flies—Drosophila melanogaster—in outer space to understand how humans have adapted to life on earth. This adaptation of fruit fly research to the farthest reaches of human experience may not seem surprising, given that they were the first animals ever brought into orbit, and have been used to study so many diverse facets of life on this planet. But how did we and the flies get here?

Nov 29, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

The project explores a novel and increasingly prominent field of German-American relations in the 1920s, student exchanges. It traces the ambitions attached to these exchanges by U.S. internationalists (especially the Institute of International Education) and German revisionists (especially the German Academic Exchange Service) and explores how these two groups hoped to achieve their objectives. It shows that it was primarily through two mechanisms, i.e. the careful selection of exchange students as well as a concerted hospitality on campus, that both sides sought to maximize the educational and political gains of these exchanges. In all, it argues that student exchanges were an important but often neglected cultural dimension of interwar transatlantic relations, which set seminal patterns in a new field of international relations as well as facilitated the German-American rapprochement after the First World War.

Nov 19, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

            Following World War II, rural America experienced a number of interconnected transformations that raised the question of what its future might look like, or whether or not it even had one. My project examines the response of policymakers, rural people, and social scientists to the problems these changes created, which I am calling the "rural crisis." More specifically, my dissertation examines how rural problems were understood by these groups, and the various ways they sought to build a new, more prosperous rural America and redefine the meaning of rural in the process. My research tracks the debates and implementation of public policies across distinct rural settings in California, Missouri, and Georgia. The records at the Rockefeller Archive Center contain significant insights into the broader debate that occurred in postwar America about how rural areas might be revitalized. The records of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, Mitchell Sviridoff, Bernard McDonald, and Winthrop Rockefeller demonstrate that many Americans did not want to abandon rural places or encourage rural people to migrate. Instead, a variety of groups, from low-income black farmers in the South to foundation officials in New York grappled with the best way to revive declining rural communities. The Archive Center provides some documentation for "nonfarm" development programs that aimed to create a new economic base for rural America outside farming. More significantly, the Center's records provide extensive evidence for a vision of farm reform rooted in economic and racial justice that commanded significant attention in the postwar period.

Nov 06, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

The early twentieth century saw a shift in the perspectives and policies related to medical care in India. In place of hospital care, preventive public health initiatives became more and more important. In this context, health education for individuals including enhancing consciousness for sanitation and hygiene, and protecting maternal and child health received greater attention than before. In the changing international scenario of the early twentieth century, improvements in maternal and infant health became matters of world-wide interest. Increasing imperial rivalries and anxieties about the future health condition of the children of army men, to some extent, prompted certain measures aimed at improving the health of mothers and children through adoption of public health measures. Child welfare movements developed in different parts of the world. In India, health policies of both colonial administrative personnel and administrators in native princely states, efforts of voluntary non-governmental agencies, as well as activities of international philanthropic organisations all played crucial roles in developing these new kinds of public health sensibilities and initiatives. The views expressed by the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and the role it played in this respect remain significant.

Oct 25, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

This project examines the development of American humanitarianism in the era of the world wars. It explores how, in the absence of state power, private citizens often filled the void. Their activities expand the common definition of diplomacy by noting myriad ways private organizations and individuals, including the Rockefeller Foundation and its partners, attempted to influence the direction of American foreign relations. The primary argument here is to demonstrate that American citizens, who grew frustrated at the lack of government involvement in world affairs during the first-half of the twentieth century, sought to insert themselves into positions of power and influence. This project shows that, in the absence of the state, many American individuals and NGOs formed partnerships and coordinated their humanitarian activities on a global scale. In specific ways, they undertook the roles and strategies of foreign policy professionals: stationing professionals in foreign offices, raising and appropriating large sums of money, providing food and medicine, coordinating the mass migration of refugees, and negotiating with foreign governments. By doing so, they acted as "shadow diplomats" – working as a shadow government in opposition to the recognized state authority, but also working in the shadows, away from most public attention and scrutiny, because they reasoned that quiet actions would produce the desired results.

Oct 18, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

The Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University was an important location where Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his researchers developed methods for the statistical analysis of audience interpretation of mass media messages. Although several studies exist of Lazarsfeld and the BASR, no attention has been paid to the numerous women who worked there. In fact, the very history of Communication Studies, with a few exceptions, overlooks the important role women's work played in the development of lasting theories of mediated communication, as well as methods for audience research. By 1949, seven women were listed as members of the BASR on the bureau's letterhead: Jeanette Green, Marie Jahoda, Babette Kass, Patricia L. Kendall, Rose Kohn, Louise Moses, and Patricia J. Salter. The work histories of these women show that, during the 1940s and 1950s, female social scientists negotiated the pursuit of careers as social scientists with several important pressures. These pressures included gendered expectations regarding female employment, foreclosure of entrance into tenured academic positions, anti-communism of the early Cold War, and foundation-based funding opportunities for research. This research report outlines some of the work histories of the women conducting audience research in the 1940s vis-a-vis foundation-based funding opportunities.

Oct 16, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

I visited the Rockefeller Archive Center to research the William H. Whyte papers for my doctoral dissertation, "Transactional Terrains: Partnerships, Bargains and the Postwar Redefinition of the Public Realm, New York City 1965-1980," that traces the architectural and urban history of the privatization of the public realm. At the center of the research is New York City during the "urban crisis" years of the 1960s. The period saw an ongoing shift in how city and state governments initiated, financed, and managed architecture and urban development. As an administrative apparatus of crisis management, the public-private partnership was the fiscal and legal device that was at the center of this shift. With the public-private partnership, there was an increased emphasis on transactions between jurisdictional authorities and private sector actors. The 1960s witnessed the beginnings of organized cultivation of private sector participation by city and state governments, in the funding, management, and provision of public goods (parks, plazas, and housing). By examining the ecology and economy of these public-private partnerships, the dissertation seeks to examine the privatization of the public realm in New York City as a series of complex intersections between the city's economic, political, urban, architectural and real-estate histories beginning in the 1960s. Urbanist William H. Whyte's writings, research, and speeches on the design and value of public spaces in New York City have shaped policy and theory in architecture, urban design, and planning since the early 1960s. He was a prominent figure, specifically for my first chapter.

Oct 11, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

When the Ford Foundation entered India in 1951, its focus was overwhelmingly rural. As its presence expanded over time, it branched out to other areas such as education and culture, small-scale industrial development, manpower and management, population control and family planning, and technical training. Historians of development and U.S. foreign relations have over the past decade explored various facets of the foundation's activities in India. However, thus far, its role in the urban sphere in India and perhaps even globally has not received much scholarly attention. I began my research at the Rockefeller Archive Center in September 2017, with the intention of studying a very specific urban project in India: the Ford Foundation's planning assistance to Calcutta (now Kolkata) from 1961 to 1974, then India's largest and industrially most important city. Given the lack of secondary references on this topic, I came in with some basic questions. 1) Why did the Ford Foundation get involved in Calcutta's urban renewal project? 2) What was the nature of the Foundation's involvement? More specifically, was it a grant for training or simply a planning program? At that stage in my dissertation research, I had hoped to have a chapter on the Ford Foundation and use it as a contrast to study the response of locally-based Indian and British businesses to Calcutta's civic and infrastructural problems, which had started to make international headlines by the late 1950s. In fact, my main focus was on Calcutta's businesses. However, as I will chart out in this report, the archival materials at the RAC persuaded me to reorient and broaden my core research questions and framework.

Sep 27, 2018

Rockefeller Archive Center;

In 1990, feminists and doctors hailed the long-term birth control device, Norplant, as the greatest advancement in birth control technology since the 1960s. By 2002, in response to an avalanche of feminist criticism and over 200 class action lawsuits, Norplant's distributor removed the contraceptive device from the U.S. market. My research, the first historical study of the drug, links the politics of Norplant to the expansion of feminism, the politicization of class action lawsuits, and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s.