Customer Reviews

Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History

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I am puzzled by the acidity of the review by "J Onyx", who contrasts the supposedly unscholarly and "Marxist" authors of this collection with the scholarly "gentleman" Robert Bremner, who wrote various works on the history of American Philanthropy. J Onyx even speculates that these historians waited until Professor Bremner was gone before they published their writings.

I was one of Professor Bremner's graduate students at Ohio State and assisted him with his revision of his classic work American Philanthropy. Bob Bremner was indeed a gentleman, and he treated other scholars with an irenic spirit even when he disagreed with them. It is impossible for me to imagine Bob Bremner being so uncharitable of other scholars as J Onyx, or engaging in such an acerbic and inaccurate misrepresentation of a work.

This is an important collection of well-researched essays. Anybody interested in the role of philanthropy in American history must begin with this volume.

wish I had a better professor teaching the material. This is a great primer to the history of charity and philanthropy. I used it as a text for a Masters level course. The book taught me more than its presentation in the course, but... it happens...