This is the first of a series of volumes dealing with the changing pattern of men’s aspirations for their society during a long and critical period in the history of western Europe. The present volume is an essay commenting on the subject and presenting conclusions drawn from a considerable mass of available evidence. Topics include the decline of the Middle Ages and the emergency of endemic poverty in the sixteenth century, the gradual assumption of national responsibility for the poor, the evolution of the charitable trust, the literature of exhortation, and the changing structure of class aspirations.

Wilbur Kitchener Jordan was president of Radcliffe College and professor of history at Harvard University.

This 1933 survey of moneylending in Great Britain is part of a general survey of small loans prepared for the Russell Sage Foundation, the Small Loan Series of the Department of Remedial Loans. It traces the development of British moneylending by chronological periods and aims to show the devices whereby the enterprise of moneylending has adapted itself to its changing legal, economic, and social environments.

Dorothy Johnson Orchard was research assistant at the Russell Sage Foundation. Geoffrey May was a member of the Inner Temple, London.

Based on field studies of the 1929 administration of marriage laws in 96 in 30 states of the United States, Marriage and the State is an account of the marriage laws in existence at the time. The historical background of marriage law and social importance of the topics are also considered.

Mary E. Richmond was the author of Social Diagnosis and What Is Social Case Work? She was the director of the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation. Fred S. Hall was joint author of American Marriage Laws.

This manual was prepared as a companion to Marriage and the State by Mary E. Richmond and Fred S. Hall. Marriage and the State is an account, based on field studies in 96 cities in 30 states, of the marriage laws in existence in 1929. This volume combines all the statutory regulations of marriage, and all the pertinent court decisions relating to marriage in each jurisdiction of the continental United States at the time. It contains 50 outlines of the law of the several states, the law of the District of Columbia, and the federal law. The statute law includes all legislation in force at the end of the 1927 legislative sessions; the decisional law, all printed cases up to January, 1927.

Geoffrey May was a staff member of the Russell Sage Foundation and served on the faculties of the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago.

By virtue of its size, New York City was the first American city to encounter the large-scale health problems of rapid urbanization. As a result, it was forced to pioneer in areas of medicine and health, and to relate public health developments to political, economic, and social change.

A History of Public Health in New York City, 1866–1966, is the second of two volumes by John Duffy. The preceding volume traced the development of the sanitary and health problems of New York form the earliest Dutch times to the culmination of the nineteenth-century reform movement that produced the Metropolitan Health Act of 1866, the forerunner of the New York City Department of Health. In this book, Duffy provides a fascinating and beautifully documented short history of many important aspects of life in New York City over the 100 year period—sanitation, water, food, housing, schools, hospitals, clinics, health centers, diseases, medical care, and the general state of medicine. Chapters provide a narrative history of the major developments in the Health Department, followed by several topical chapters dealing with environmental conditions, epidemic diseases, the state of medicine, and maternal and child health.

John Duffy was Priscilla Aiden Burke Professor of History at the University of Maryland.

With The Charities of Rural England, 1480–1660, Professor Jordan concludes his study of the metamorphosis of English social and cultural institutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has been concerned with documenting the shift in men’s aspirations from an absorption with the needs of the spiritual society to an intense preoccupation with the secular needs of mankind. He has accordingly sought to describe and analyze the rapid growth of charitable giving, wherewith generous men were to establish firmly the foundations of the principal social and cultural institutions of the modern world.

In this volume, the author deals with the charitable contributions of Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, and Yorkshire, selected principally because of their historical and geographical diversity and because they yielded to the process of social change with differing rates of momentum. Taken together, they represent a cross section of rural England in the early modern age.

It is Professor Jordan’s view that the gentry were the principal architects of social change and that they willingly undertook a very large measure of social responsibility. But it is clear that great merchant wealth was also flowing in for a variety of purposes. It is not too much to say that the charitable wealth of the gentry and the merchants was merged to effect the transformation of whole regions and to afford to mankind not only a measure of protection against poverty but substantial hope for the betterment of life and opportunity in generations to come.

Wilbur Kitchener Jordan was president of Radcliffe College and professor of history at Harvard University.

A general history of large American philanthropic foundations from their creation in the nineteenth century to the larger development of such foundations in the twentieth century, this 1954 book is an attempt to provide a systematic, historical interpretation of twentieth-century foundation principles, planning, and operation.

Joseph C. Kiger taught history at the University of Alabama and Washington University, St. Louis.

An examination of philanthropic efforts in London between 1480 and 1660, exploring the urban social conscience and the power of urban aspirations at the time, as well as the origins of modern cultural institutions in England. Jordan documents the vast charitable system made in London and the social philosophy of the merchant aristocracy which controlled the city’s affairs.

Wilbur Kitchener Jordan was president of Radcliffe College and a historian specializing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.