Search results for ""author thomas adam""

The first book to provide the English-speaking reader with the revisionist interpretation of the role of the state and philanthropy in Germany that is increasingly embraced by German historians. Largely unnoticed among English-speaking scholars of German history, a major shift in interpretation of German history has been underway during the past three decades among German historians of Germany. While American and British historians continue to subscribe to an interpretation of German society as state centered, their German counterparts have begun to embrace an interpretation in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century German society was characterized by private initiative and a vibrant civil society. Public institutions such as museums, high schools, universities, hospitals, and charities relied heavily on the support of wealthy donors. State funding for universitiesand high schools, for instance, accounted only for a fragment of the operating costs of those institutions, while private endowments running into the millions of marks funded scholarships as well as health care for teachers and students. Private support for public institutions was essential for their existence and survival: it was the backbone of Germany's civil society. This book is the first to provide the English-speaking reader with this revisionist interpretation of the role of the state and philanthropy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany: a society in which private actors claimed responsibility for the common good and used philanthropic engagement to shape societyaccording to their visions. . Thomas Adam is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has published extensively in the field of transnational history and the history of philanthropy.

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In Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society, Thomas Adam has assembled a comparative set of case studies that challenge long-held and little-studied assumptions about the modern development of philanthropy. Histories of philanthropy have often neglected European patterns of giving and the importance of financial patronage to the emergence of modern industrialized societies. It has long been assumed, for example, that Germany never developed civic traditions of philanthropy as in the United States. In truth, however, 19th-century German museums, art galleries, and social housing projects were not only privately founded and supported, they were also blueprints for the creation of similar public institutions in North America. The comparative method of the essays also reveals the extent to which the wealthy classes on both sides of the Atlantic defined themselves through their philanthropic activities.Contributors are Thomas Adam, Maria Benjamin Baader, Karsten Borgmann, Tobias Brinkmann, Brett Fairbairn, Eckhardt Fuchs, David C. Hammack, Dieter Hoffmann, Simone Lässig, Margaret Eleanor Menninger, and Susannah Morris.

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