Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States: A Reader. Ed. by David C. Hammack. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. xx, 481 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-253-33489-6.)

Lasting Legacy to the Carolinas: The Duke Endowment, 1924-1994. By Robert F. Durden. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. xiv, 386 pp. $55.95, isbn 0-8223-2151-3.)

Two new books provide welcome additions to a growing literature that analyzes the history of philanthropy in the United States. However, each has a very different purpose and potential audience. The Case Western University historian David C. Hammack's reader provides a wealth of thoughtfully chosen documents and scholarly commentaries on the history of the nonprofit sector in the United States from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The Duke University emeritus professor Robert F. Durden's study of the history of the Duke Endowment has a far more limited reach. It provides a carefully researched history of a charitable organization that itself had narrowly defined objectives. 1

Hammack has organized Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States into four sections, divided by chronology and subject matter. Each seeks to provide answers to the question: "Why, uniquely among nations, has the United States conducted almost all of its formal religious activity, as well as many cultural, arts, human service, educational, and research activities through private non-profit organizations?" . . .

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