Use the live research desk
Filter the timeline by period or place, reported outcome and depth. Open the lessons and source links, then compare two different cases in the notebook. A timeline does not establish causation. Record differences and missing perspectives before carrying a lesson into a new setting.
Your workspace stays in this browser. Save records, edit them or fork frozen versions, export JSON, a research memo or CSV, and import a backup with an explicit replacement step. Deleting or clearing offers an undo while the page remains open. No notes are submitted to Charitology. The institutional goals below remain the program’s longer-term charter.
What it is
Giving has a long record, and much of it has never been read as evidence. The History of Charity program studies that record: which efforts solved a problem for good, which ones failed and why, and what each one teaches today. Each study becomes an entry in the Historical Case Studies.
How it works
Every case follows one format: what happened, where and when, where it acted on the depth scale, and the lessons that carry over. Cases are labeled as successes, failures or mixed results, and every claim is sourced. The first case is the eradication of smallpox, which the World Health Organization judged complete in 1980.
History also holds earlier attempts at a science of giving, and Charitology studies them as closely as any other case. Starting with the London Charity Organization Society, founded in 1869, reformers tried to put charity on a scientific footing. They investigated and registered applicants, kept central records and brought local charities together to coordinate their work. Their methods later fed into the casework of modern social work. They also screened applicants by asking whether each one was worthy or unworthy. Both halves of that legacy are lessons. The first shows that careful method can grow into a profession. The second is a warning Charitology takes seriously: study the system, and never grade the people in it.
Why it matters for the system
History is the only place where the long run has already happened. The Short Horizon means most giving is judged within a year or two. A case study can show what a twenty-year effort achieved, or what a quick success cost later.
History also works against the Silence About Failure. Failures that were never published at the time can still be studied from archives, so their lessons are learned once instead of again and again.
Risks and limits
The surviving records may come mostly from funders and institutions rather than the people they served, and famous successes may be better documented than quiet failures. The program seeks sources from the communities involved, and each case should say how complete its record is.
What success looks like
Within five years, the case studies cover successes, failures and mixed results from many regions and centuries, and Charitology’s methods cite the historical evidence behind them.
A comparative history desk
Browse 13 sourced case studies in date order. Case outcomes and depth classifications are this project’s draft descriptions; source links let you challenge them.
- 1881–1917
Carnegie’s public libraries
Andrew Carnegie paid for more than 2,500 library buildings on one condition, that each town keep its library running with public money. The gift built the buildings, and the towns’ commitment made them last.
United States, Scotland and other countries · success · depth 3 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- A matching condition can turn a one-time gift into a permanent institution. Carnegie paid for the building, and the town promised to pay for the library every year after.
- Simple, standard terms let a small office run thousands of grants. One application form set the same conditions for every town.
- A program that defers to local power inherits local exclusions. Who counts as “the community” decides who a community gift serves.
- 1909–1914
The hookworm campaign in the American South
A five-year, $1 million Rockefeller commission surveyed hundreds of Southern counties, treated more than 400,000 people for hookworm and pushed for sanitary privies. Hookworm was not eradicated, but school enrollment and literacy rose most where infection had been worst.
Southern United States · success · depth 3 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- Measuring the problem first gave the campaign a baseline. County surveys before treatment, and resurveys after, showed whether the work was paying off.
- A time-limited funder can leave something permanent by working through public agencies. State and local governments took over some of the work as the commission wound down.
- Treating infected people repairs the damage, while privies and shoes stop new infections. Treatment alone lets a parasite come back.
- A name can overpromise. The commission was for “eradication,” and hookworm was reduced, not eliminated.
- 1912–1932
The Rosenwald schools
A Black educator and a Chicago businessman started a program that built nearly 5,000 schools for Black children in the segregated rural South, with local communities and governments paying most of the cost. Economists later found the schools explain a large share of that era’s gains in Black education.
Rural South, United States · success · depth 3 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- Matching grants can multiply a gift and build ownership. Over time the fund’s share of a school’s cost fell from about a quarter to 10 to 15 percent, with local people and governments paying the rest.
- In a system that tends to redirect money away from the people it is meant for, funding things that are hard to divert, like buildings, desks and books, protects the gift.
- Matching has a cost too. Communities that could not raise their share could be turned down, so a match can favor the places that need help least.
- A fund built to spend itself out can move fast and avoid outliving its purpose.
- 1943–2000
The Green Revolution
Foundation-funded crop research gave farmers high-yield wheat and rice, and cereal harvests in the developing world roughly tripled. The gains were uneven, and some of the costs, from falling water tables to narrower diets, showed up decades later.
Mexico, South and Southeast Asia, and other developing regions · mixed · depth 3 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- Research that every farmer can use is a public good. Funding the institutions that keep producing it can change a whole food system, not one farm at a time.
- Measuring success in one unit, tons of grain, hid costs that were counted in other units, such as water, soil, diets and who was left out.
- Many of the harms grew from the rules around the technology, such as subsidies that encouraged overuse of inputs. The same tool does more or less damage depending on the policies it arrives with.
- Costs that arrive decades later are easy to leave out of a success story. Long-horizon work needs long-horizon accounting.
- 1967–1980
The eradication of smallpox
A coordinated global campaign ended a disease that had killed people for thousands of years. It remains the only human disease ever eradicated.
Worldwide · success · depth 4 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- A precise, shared goal (zero cases) let thousands of organizations and governments coordinate around one measurable target.
- Surveillance and ring vaccination, which meant finding cases and vaccinating everyone around them, beat trying to vaccinate everyone everywhere. Learning which approach worked mattered as much as the money.
- Eradication can end recurring disease and treatment, while preparedness and safe handling of laboratory stocks still need support.
- 1970s–2010s
Scared Straight
Programs that brought at-risk teenagers into prisons to be confronted by inmates spread across the United States on the strength of a documentary. Randomized trials found they increased later offending, yet versions of the programs carried on for decades.
United States and other countries · failure · depth 2 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- Success stories without a comparison group can’t show that a program works. The original documentary reported that 16 of 17 teenagers stayed out of trouble for three months, and compared them with no one.
- A program can feel right, cost almost nothing and still cause harm. Only randomized comparisons revealed it.
- Evidence of harm does not stop a program by itself. In one case, negative results ended the evaluation instead of the program.
- The more dramatic, cheap and intuitive a program is, the faster it spreads, so those are the programs most in need of testing.
- 1971–2000
How oral rehydration therapy spread
A drink of clean water, sugar and salt can save a child from dying of diarrhea. After it was used to treat refugees during a 1971 cholera outbreak, it spread through health programs and door-to-door teaching, while child deaths from diarrhea fell from an estimated 4.6 million a year in 1980 to about 1.5 million by 2000.
Bangladesh, India and worldwide · success · depth 0 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- The cheapest fix can be one of the biggest. Oral rehydration salts cost a few cents per treatment.
- Putting treatment in families’ hands, not only in clinics, is what let it reach millions. That meant convincing doctors that people with little training could give it.
- Checking whether people can really do what they were taught is part of the intervention. Years after BRAC’s campaign, researchers tested the solutions mothers made at home.
- Relief at scale is not a lesser good. A treatment that meets the need today, everywhere, can save more lives than far more ambitious programs.
- 1983–2013
D.A.R.E.’s original curriculum
Police officers teaching children to resist drugs became the most widely used school drug prevention program in the United States. Rigorous evaluations of the original curriculum found little or no effect on drug use, and the program eventually replaced it.
United States · failure · depth 2 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- Popularity and evidence can run on separate tracks for decades. The program stayed dominant while rigorous studies found small or no effects.
- How a lesson is taught can matter as much as what it says. In a 1994 comparison, interactive programs that built social skills did better than D.A.R.E.’s officer-led lessons.
- An evaluation changes nothing until it reaches the people who decide what gets funded.
- An organization can change course on evidence and say so. D.A.R.E. now states on its own history page that the original curriculum had little long-term effect.
- 1985–present
The campaign to eradicate polio
Since 1988 a global partnership has cut wild polio cases by more than 99 percent and eradicated two of the three wild strains. The original deadline was the year 2000, and the last stretch has proved the hardest.
Worldwide · mixed · depth 4 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- A precise goal with a shared scoreboard, zero cases, has held governments, agencies and a volunteer movement together for decades.
- A civic network can be funder, fundraiser and advocate at once. Rotary helped start the effort, and its members have contributed more than $2.7 billion.
- The last 1 percent can be harder than the first 99. A deadline set at the start rarely survives the hardest places.
- Program data can look better than reality. Independent audits are how a campaign finds out what its own numbers miss.
- 2005–2014
One Laptop per Child
A nonprofit started by MIT Media Lab faculty set out to give schoolchildren around the world low-cost laptops of their own, and governments bought hundreds of thousands. In Peru children used computers far more but did no better in math or language, and in Uruguay reading and math scores did not improve.
Peru, Uruguay and other countries · mixed · depth 3 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- Delivering a thing is not the same as delivering what the thing is for. The laptops reached children, and better test scores did not follow.
- Test the theory of change before scaling it. The big evaluations reported after governments had already bought laptops for whole school systems.
- What you measure shapes what you learn. Peru’s evaluation found no effect on test scores and inconclusive gains in general thinking skills, and observers disagreed about which outcomes mattered most.
- Randomizing during a national rollout is what made these lessons knowable. That choice deserves as much attention as the results.
- 2005–2010
PlayPumps
A merry-go-round that pumped water as children played drew $16.4 million in pledges and wide celebrity support. Field reports later found many pumps broken, unused or slower than the hand pumps they replaced, and the backers stopped the rollout and said so publicly.
Southern Africa · failure · depth 2 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- A story can outrun the evidence. The picture of children playing while water flowed raised millions and a 4,000-pump target before independent field assessments came in.
- Bad news traveled slowly. Field partners saw breakdowns early and a 2007 UNICEF assessment raised concerns, but the report stayed internal, and the first public acknowledgment came in 2009.
- When the people who will use a technology don’t choose it, mismatches follow. In some places a PlayPump replaced a hand pump that delivered more water per hour.
- Stopping a program and explaining why, in public, is how the field learns. It works best when it happens early.
- 2010–2015
Rebuilding Haiti after the 2010 earthquake
Billions of dollars poured into Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, almost all of the relief aid through international organizations. In 2015 ProPublica and NPR reported that the American Red Cross had raised nearly half a billion dollars and built six permanent homes. The Red Cross said it had helped millions of Haitians in other ways.
Haiti · failure · depth 1 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- Giving that follows the news arrives in a burst, mostly without research, and attention fades long before rebuilding is done.
- Money raised for one disaster is, in practice, tied to that place and to the group that raised it. When land titles, partners and government capacity take years to sort out, a large earmarked sum can outrun the ability to spend it well.
- Aid that goes around local institutions leaves them no stronger. Almost all relief aid went to international agencies and organizations rather than through Haitian ones.
- Counting people helped is not the same as measuring what changed. Without project-level spending and results, big claims can’t be checked by anyone.
- 2014–2024
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
In the summer of 2014 a viral video challenge raised $115 million for the ALS Association, which turned the money into research grants, clinics and advocacy. It is a case of attention-driven giving that funded lasting work, and a reminder that attention picks causes by what spreads, not by need.
United States and online worldwide · mixed · depth 1 (hypothesis) · draft
Lessons and sources
- Attention can raise a fortune in a single summer, but it chooses causes by what spreads, not by the size or neglect of the need.
- A windfall does the most good when it is turned into things that keep working, such as research teams, clinics and trained people.
- Self-reported impact needs independent checks. The 10-year evaluation leaned on a grantee survey that only about a quarter of grantees answered.
- A campaign total can’t say whether the money was new giving or giving moved from other causes. That counterfactual is the question that matters most and is the hardest to answer.
No case matches these filters.
Ordering uses the first four-digit year in each period label. A timeline is not a causal test. Compare sources and counterfactual explanations before carrying a lesson to a new setting.
Historical comparison notebook
New recordConnect two cases through a specific question, examine differences and preserve what the surviving evidence cannot show.
Your work stays in this browser. Export a backup to move it elsewhere. Entries are your research notes, not verified findings or ratings.