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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A New Dealized Grand Old Party: Labor, Civil Rights, and the Remaking of American Liberalism, 1935-1973

July 21, 2020

Drawing on the wealth of material from the Nelson A. Rockefeller papers held at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), my dissertation project examines the rise and fall of the "liberal" wing of the mid-twentieth century Republican Party. Big city Republicans from industrial states faced social movements that made mass democracy a vibrant force. Liberal Republicans emerged among the typically wellto-do men and women of older and established neighborhoods in New York, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. While no less an elite class than other Republican partisans, urban Republicans witnessed the upheavals and political transformation of the city firsthand. Unlike the rural and suburban right, big city Republicans simply could not imagine mounting a frontal assault against the vaunted New Deal coalition. In this setting, the reactionary bent of the party's base actually looked more like an electoral liability. Liberal Republicans insisted that winning statewide (or national) office required votes from major cities home to a diverse and organized working class that otherwise voted for Democrats. But securing any significant segment of that vote required a series of accommodations that most Republicans simply could not tolerate.

Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers; Rockefeller Family; Urban and Suburban

The Several Meanings of Global Health History: The Case of Yellow Fever

November 2, 2017

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.

Biology and Medical Research; Public Health; Rockefeller Foundation

Prevailing Upon the World John D. Rockefeller, Jr. & the Architecture of International Houses (1921-1936)

January 1, 2016

In 1946 when the newly formed United Nations was searching for a suitable site for its headquarters, the American philanthropist and heir to the Standard Oil and Gas fortune, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought and gifted eighteen acres of land on Manhattan's east side to the organization. This gift -- as well as the Second World War that had preceded it -- marked the official resumption of American leadership in world affairs. But for Rockefeller it was also the culmination of a decades-long campaign of architectural patronage and cultural philanthropy, which had aimed at positioning the United States as exactly the type of political messiah it was now becoming. A precursor to the UN project, and to this idea of American leadership, may be found in the earlier and relatively obscure International House movement in the United States and France, which was also championed by Rockefeller.

A City Within a City: Community Development and the Struggle Over Harlem, 1961-2001

January 1, 2012

While Harlem, New York found itself deep in the midst of "urban crisis" in the mid- 1960s, by the late 1990s commentators invoked Harlem's rich past to describe its apparent resurgence, or "Second Renaissance." Harlem's transformation came about in an era of profound global, national, and local political economic shifts, but residents themselves played a crucial role in negotiating and effecting the redevelopment of their neighborhood at the scale of its buildings and streets. My dissertation, "A City Within a City: Community Development and the Struggle Over Harlem, 1961-2001," examines the grassroots response of residents in Harlem to questions of development in the last four decades of the twentieth century. While most historians have considered citizen activism as the conclusion of the major postwar American project of urban redevelopment, or the large-scale, government-led reconstruction of cities, this study contends that such community-based activism also marked the beginning of a new era in urban history. By using one exemplary place to tell this story, I explore the world's best-known predominantly African-American neighborhood as both an exceptional and representative case among American cities in the aftermath of federally funded urban renewal.

Liberalism and the Politics of Public Health in New York City

January 1, 2011

I came to the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) to do research for a book about the political economy of healthcare in New York City in the postwar era. Tentatively titled "Separate and Unequal: Public Health and Private Interests in New York City," the book examines medical inequality in the delivery of healthcare to New Yorkers. The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and the Commonwealth Fund (CF) supported a range of healthcare initiatives, including the implementation of pre-paid health insurance in the 1940s, the creation of standards for graduates of foreign medical schools who wished to continue their postgraduate training in U.S. hospitals as interns and residents in the 1950s, and bio-ethical and bio-medical research in community medicine, the training of educationally disadvantaged African-Americans and Latinos in allied health professions, and the rise of innovative medical school curricula in the sixties and seventies.

Rockefeller Foundation and Health Demonstration Projects 1920-1940

January 1, 2011

On November 10, 1921, New York City's East Harlem Health Center Demonstration Project opened to great fanfare. The project self-consciously characterized itself as a "department store of health and welfare," playing on the success of the urban institution that promised everything that one could imagine buying, in one central location. Similarly, the East Harlem Health Center gathered over twenty three of the neighborhood's health and social welfare agencies into one newly refurbished building for the same kind of "one stop shopping" for coordinated health and welfare services. The concept of "coordination" was key to the success of the demonstration. Public and private agencies would keep control of their budgets and personnel, but the demonstration would test the premise that physical proximity would eliminate costly service duplication, ease access to resources needed by the predominantly Italian community, and, in the end, deliver better health outcomes.

The Downtown Lower Manhattan Association

January 1, 2009

David Rockefeller's Downtown Lower Manhattan Association (DLMA) helped create SoHo, one of the first New York neighborhoods to revitalize at a time of real and perceived decline in American central cities. In the years from 1960 to 1980, SoHo (roughly the 12 square blocks between Broadway, West Broadway, Houston and Canal Streets in Manhattan) went from a declining industrial area filled with decrepit loft buildings to a vibrant artist colony filled with increasingly upscale art galleries, retail stores and loft residences. In a sense, SoHo was one of New York's first gentrified neighborhoods.

Watershed Moments: An Environmental History of the New York City Water Supply

January 1, 2009

Watershed Moments highlights changes in democratic governance and environmental policy in twentieth-century America by exploring the development and elaboration of New York City's water supply network. Unlike most historical treatments of municipal water supply, this study emphasizes water management over system construction. Placing issues of management at the center of the narrative reveals the transformations in City water policy and the growing trend toward resource cooperation that marked the final decades of the twentieth century. Sociologists and political scientists have recognized the increasing tendency toward consensus on thorny environmental conflicts in the 1990s, but they have not probed the historical forces behind this transformation. This study fills this important gap in the literature though a careful analysis of the country's most extensive water supply network.

Ecology and Environment; Rockefeller Family; Urban and Suburban

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