"Inventing the Nonprofit Sector" and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations

Philanthropy and voluntarism are among the most familiar and least understood of American institutions. The oldest American nonprofit corporation -- Harvard College -- dates from 1636, but most of the million or so nonprofits currently in existence were established after 1960. In "Inventing the Nonprofit Sector" and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations, cultural historian Peter Dobkin Hall describes and analyzes the development of America's fastest growing institutional sector.

Hall's hope for the future of nonprofit scholarship is that it will develop into full maturity through intensified intellectual exchange with other academic fields. His own book is a major step in that direction. Journal of American History A welcome and important addition to the rather thin body of scholarship on the nonprofit sector... Hall's essays make a significant contribution toward our understanding of some of the potential and limits of nonprofit institutions. Hall has demonstrated why the ongoing debate over the role of the nonprofit sector is healthy for the sector and important in a democracy. History of Education Quarterly Hall's treatment of the intertwining of interest group and academic politics in the recent development of philanthropic studies is especially interesting. Business History Review

Peter Dobkin Hall is Leonard Bacon Research Scholar in the Yale University Program on Non-Profit Organizations and teaches in the Divinity School at Yale University.