Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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The Women of Communication Studies and Foundation Funding

October 18, 2018

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.

Mass Communications; Rockefeller Foundation; Social Sciences; Women

Nature's Parkway: Landscape and Philanthropy at the Palisades Interstate Park, 1900-1930

January 1, 2017

Between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, the Palisades were transformed from a site of industrial excavation to a motorist's paradise. Driving that transformation was the conservationist vision of John D. Rockefeller Jr. (JDR Jr.). The particular type of conservation being practiced was shaped by JDR Jr.'s attempts to expand access to nature by building automobile roads within parks. Roads, JDR believed, were the best way to experience nature. Through his philanthropy the Palisades Interstate Park was reshaped to accommodate natureloving American motorist in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

John D. Rockefeller and the Golf House in Lakewood, New Jersey

January 1, 2008

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to be with you tonight to talk about John D. Rockefeller, and to finally have the opportunity to visit Lakewood. As someone whose job is to help other researchers learn about our collections and to figure out how the archives might be helpful for their research, I rarely get an opportunity for any concentrated study of the materials themselves, so I am doubly pleased to have been able to use this occasion not only to get out of the archives and see where Rockefeller history happened, but also to have a chance to examine in some detail certain aspects of John D. Rockefeller's life in Lakewood. Tonight I hope to give you a better sense of who John D. Rockefeller was, where his life in Lakewood fits in the larger picture of his life and career, and to review some of the particular details that the archives reveal about the history of the Rockefeller estate in Lakewood, which he always called Golf House.

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