John Branch

John Branch is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. He is broadly interested in the history of capitalism and economic thought, the history of science, labor, gender, and the political economy of public goods and services. His current book project, “Working for a Cause: The Politics of Nonprofits in the American Economy, 1947-1995,” is a social, political, and intellectual history of the dramatic growth of the nonprofit economy in the second half of the twentieth century. American leaders frequently appealed to nonprofits as unique sites where people came together voluntarily, escaping the strictures of the state and the market, to solve social problems. Yet nonprofits were also creatures of the market themselves. This project analyzes connected political struggles over nonprofit work and nonprofits’ relationship to the state—arguing that efforts to remake the relationships between the nonprofit sector, for-profit business, and the state were inextricable from competing visions of nonprofit employees as volunteers, as professionals, and as class-conscious workers. 
 
John received a PhD in History from Northwestern University. His research has been supported by institutions including the Rockefeller Archive Center, Harvard Business School's Business History Initiative, and the Walter P. Reuther Library, and his work has been published in venues including Modern American History, Public Books, and HistPhil. He has also worked for a community archive and as a consultant with multiple organizations on their institutional histories. At CPH, John works on the Global Oral History of PEPFAR project.