The Saint John’s Bible, commissioned by the Benedictine fathers of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and funded by 1,500 donors, is a completely handwritten and hand-illuminated Bible. It is Read more…
Only major centers like New York and Boston can support great museums. Such is the conventional wisdom, but Alice Walton didn’t buy it. She had a vision of creating a Read more…
Hedge-fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is sometimes refered to as “George Soros’s right-wing twin” due to his support of think tanks and public policy research on the conservative side of the Read more…
The oldest art museum and art school in America was built up through many decades of private support, particularly from Philadelphia business leaders. With George Clymer—a revered Pennsylvania merchant and Read more…
The Library of Congress was established by an official act in 1800 as a modest reference library for America’s legislators, and composed primarily of law books. The collection was destroyed Read more…
Thomas Jefferson sometimes argued that the earth belonged to the living and that each generation owed little to those before or after it. At times he lived his own life Read more…
An atheneum, in nineteenth-century parlance, was a cultural institution broadly devoted to art, books, science, history, and other fields, often broadly combined in a mix of library, gallery, scientific rooms, Read more…
James Smithson was a British scientist with no obvious connection to the United States. He had no family in the New World, had never visited, and had built his successful Read more…
Mount Vernon was the legacy of one great man. Preserving it was the work of many great women. The Mount Vernon estate had been in George Washington’s family since 1674. Read more…
On July 4, 1866, a number of well-to-do Americans in Paris are celebrating Independence Day with a fancy dinner. The group includes Mr. Bigelow, the American ambassador; Mr. Fox, assistant Read more…
William Corcoran was a D.C. native, having been born in Georgetown in 1798. He started his first business by age 19, lost it in an economic downturn by age 27, Read more…
After the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the city’s art scene was devastated. It was Chicago philanthropists who rebuilt it. One notable funder was Charles Hutchinson, who founded the Art Read more…
Waldemar Nielsen called Andrew Carnegie “an extremist in every sense.” When Carnegie gave, he really gave. And the man who had started life as a poor immigrant considered libraries the Read more…
Like so many other great philanthropists, Andrew Carnegie was raised poor. He started work at age nine and steadily progressed upward, making it big in railroads, oil, mining, steelmaking, and Read more…
William Volker was a millionaire by age 47, and could have been so earlier had he not begun each workday by meeting with anyone who asked and writing checks to Read more…
Though he is no longer mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg continues to nudge public policy—these days as a donor. In 2014 he put up $50 million to create Read more…
With almost predictable regularity over recent years, the Department of Veterans Affairs has become embroiled in repeated scandals combining failed services with mushrooming backlogs. A root of the problem is Read more…
Detroit may be America’s most ill-governed, and saddest, city. That’s the public’s verdict: The city’s population plummeted from 1.9 million in 1950 to just 680,000 in 2014, just after Detroit Read more…
he national rankings of top graduate schools in public policy have held pretty steady for some years, centered on Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, the Kennedy School at Harvard, Indiana University, Read more…
Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, first pursued an interest in media operations that promote “good government” when he funded a digital “newspaper” devoted to investigative reporting, public policy, Read more…