The Lives of 12 Philanthropists in the 19th and 20th Centuries

By Their Bootstraps: the Lives of Twelve Gilded Age Social Entrepreneurs, by Martin Morse Wooster, offers brief biographical sketches of a dozen individuals who worked to improve society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mr. Wooster, a visiting fellow at the Capital Research Center, in Washington, profiles people who founded the American Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Salvation Army, and other nonprofit groups. He says that the decades between 1850 and 1910 saw a significant rise in the number of charities serving the poor, as more and more people came to believe that individuals could alleviate social problems without significant aid from the government. This philosophy, according to the author, is today “making a comeback.”

Publisher: Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, Second Floor, New York, N.Y. 10017; (212) 599-7000; mb@manhattan-institute.org; http://www.manhattan-institute.org; 55 pages; $8.99.