Paper topic
Rethinking enlightened philanthropy:
Try to understand the way in which the philanthropic activities in late 19th century Looking at lives/work of I. N. Phelps Stokes, Jacob Schiff, Paul Cravath, Florence Kelley --> Nicholas Kelley, and the Survey Associates. Maybe even think about James Lenox and his ideas of who could use his library.
Could even possibly think about working on the idea of "labor" less as a tool for separating class and more as an American religion, or divine mind from Puritan yeoman to industrial time clocks.
Change in idea of self from "the redemption of the individual lay within the social world" pre-1860 to "the redemption of the social world lay with the individual" into the 20th cent.