| America Foundations were formed originally during late 19th and early 20th. Up to now, foundations have played important roles not only in American society, but also in other countries with large quantities, huge scales and extensive activities. At present, studies for American foundations in the academia mainly focus on the perspective of sociology, or the introduction about American certain foundation, which is lack of taking American foundations as a whole entity. The author just reviewed the course of development of American foundations, analyzed and summed up the role of American foundations in this dissertation. There are four parts in this dissertation: In the first part, the author elaborated the general situation of American foundations. Firstly, the definition of foundation is "a nongovernmental, nonprofit [entity] with its own funds (usually from a single source, either an individual, a family, or a corporation) and program managed by its own trustees and directors, established to maintain or aid educational, social, charitable, religious, or other activities serving the common welfare, primarily by making grants to other nonprofit organizations. " American foundations can be divided into independent foundations, corporate foundations, community foundations and operating foundations. Secondly, this chapter was mainly about the application procedure of American foundations, organization structure, ways of function and supervisory system. Thirdly, the activity fields of American foundations were primarily concentrated on ten fields including education, health, human services, art & culture, public affairs/society benefit, environment &animals, science& technology, social science, international affairs and religion, etc. The second part was the historical study on American modern foundations. American foundations have centuries-old philanthropic traditions, the appearance of American foundations were the result that was based on not only the need of maintaining the Capitalism by the ruler class, but also the Christian traditional spirit and self-reflection. Before the cold war, the phylogeny of American foundations can be divided into two stages. The first stage was the arisen stage of foundations from 1889 to 1939. During this stage, American foundations had three characteristics: First, foundations were showed the characteristic of "modernity", The organization of foundations was more similar to the organizational pattern of commercial company, which possessed own board of directors. Foundations were unreligious organizations that undertook philanthropy, which showed differences from church and other philanthropic organizations. Second, education, health and science were the main fields that foundations donated. Finally, the founder's kin dominated the foundations, and the elder trustees controlled the foundation boards. From 1940 to 1991, it was the second stage that American foundations developed at a high speed. During this stage, there were five characteristics in American foundations. Firstly, foundations began to pay more attention to social science and the study of public policy. Secondly, foundations took part in the more international activities. Thirdly, The united organizations and research organizations of foundations began to emerge and develop. Fourthly, social improvement and raising welfare became a new focus of American foundations. Fifthly, ideological differences between conservative and liberal foundations began to split. After the cold war, American foundations had some new tendencies. First of all, the quantity and scale of American foundations were increased with more rapid speed. Next, donated fields, administrators and the capital source of foundations presented diversification. Thirdly, the electronic function of foundations and "information foundation" appeared. Finally, the new concepts such as "Venture?Philanthropy" and "Social Entrepreneur" came forth. The third part of this dissertation was about the role of foundations in American society. The aut...
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