Jan 01 1948A Foundation fact-finding team visits the Far East at the urging of John D. Rockefeller III and concludes that only Asian professionals can come to grips with Asian population problems. Over the next eight years, the Foundation makes 45 grants exceeding $2.2 million toward that goal.
Jan 01 1947The Foundation grants $10 million to the China Medical Board as the concluding grant for Peking Union Medical College.
Jan 01 1946The Massachusetts Institute of Technology receives Foundation support to study the design and construction of Vannevar Bush’s mechanical differential analyzer, the forerunner of the computer.
Jan 01 1946Further grants are made to support completion of the 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory, San Diego County, which received its first Foundation funds in 1928.
Jan 01 1946The Foundation’s single largest appropriation of the year, $7.5 million, goes to the General Education Board to boost its declining resources. The Board’s work is now focused almost exclusively on the promotion of education for blacks and whites across the South.
Jan 01 1946Columbia University’s Russian Institute is established with Foundation support, creating the first “area studies” center in the US. Others follow.
Jan 01 1945The Foundation establishes the Atlantic Awards to assist promising British writers “dislocated and exhausted” after the war, with 47 writers, poets and playwrights receiving awards. In the US, grants are made to Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review and Pacific Spectator to subsidize young writers. Among those authors are: Irving Howe, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop.
Jan 01 1945The American Library Association purchases and in some instances microfilms 35 sets of books and sets of 350 US scholarly journals for distribution to war-ravaged libraries in Europe and Asia. A similar program for British publications is funded by the Foundation through the Royal Society in London.
Jan 01 1944The Foundation makes a grant to the University of Virginia to support Dumas Malone for his monumental biography of Thomas Jefferson.
