In December 1916, in the winter snow of New York State, while Americans busied themselves with Christmas shopping and prepared festivities, a skinny twelve-year-old boy, poorly dressed and in ragged shoes, shouted at the top of his lungs: “Buy a Mirror fer a kid in France!” Every evening after school, James Prendergast Jackson Jr. stood on a street corner and sold copies of the newspaper to earn enough money to sponsor a French child whose father had been killed in the war in France. One of six children in a working-class family, James was determined to assist a child across the ocean who, as he had learned in school, desperately needed food and clothing. Ten cents each day would secure those necessities, and James promised himself he would get those 10 cents selling newspapers. He sold seventy copies of the paper a day, for which he earned 35 cents. From Greenville, New York, James wrote to the secretary of the Junior Committee of the Fatherless Children of France Society (FCFS) – the Franco-American organization matching American “godparents” with French children whose fathers had been killed in the war – and announced his intention of “adopting” a brother in France. With candor and determination, James announced his choice of child to support with his earnings: “I wood like a boy between ten and twelve if it is the same to you.” Attached to the letter was 85 cents that he had been given for his birthday. James was assigned André Leblanc, aged eleven, rue Dautancourt, Paris.

No foreign humanitarian organization garnered more support from Americans during (and after) World War I than did the Fatherless Children of France Society. From New York City, the Franco-American private philanthropic organization rapidly raised a wave of humanitarian response for the children of France’s war dead, doing so through strategic communication and tireless networking. Members of the FCFS toured US cities, states, and territories, opening chapters and addressing assembled crowds, constantly collecting funds. Speakers vividly described the plight of starving babies in devastated France and invited those who had witnessed the trauma of children to testify. Much of the campaigning was done by women representing local committees. Americans were offered a choice on how to spend their humanitarian dollars. From the moment they became sponsors, they could be involved in the process of selecting their orphans. Most importantly, the FCFS reached the wealthy, middle, and working classes alike. In involving school children, laborers, and members of churches, clubs, and associations, the FCFS encouraged a spirit of cooperative – and sometimes competitive – humanitarianism. As a result, the FCFS mobilized large sections of US society to “adopt” some 300,000 French children who were victims of war and kept the aid flowing from 1915 to 1921.

This chapter reconstructs the dynamics of the initial encounter between the British and the question of mental health illness in Palestine into the 1920s. Far from recapitulating a familiar narrative about the colonial introduction of psychiatry as a moment of rupture, it instead offers a multi-layered account of the opening of the first government mental health hospital at Bethlehem, in order to highlight how the British were in fact latecomers to an ongoing history of psychiatry in Palestine. Well before the British occupation of 1917, Palestinians had recourse to a range of medical and non-medical options for the management of the mentally ill, and those existing understandings, experiences, and institutions crucially shaped how the British responded to mental health illness across these formative years. As well as tracing the establishment of a key institution, this chapter also introduces a central figure in the history of psychiatry in mandate Palestine: Dr Mikhail Shedid Malouf.

Chapter 3 deals with the work of the Conseil de Tutelle (Guardianship Council) from the 1840s under the jurisdiction of the Procureur Général – the head of the judiciary. It begins with the composition of the council, the decision-making process, and the conditions under which placement occurred. We learn about the sex, age, and the origin of minors, as well as the identity and origin of their parents. Also, the identity, place of abode, and profession of guardians provide valuable clues about the potential fate of minors. The chapter distinguishes between the Conseil de Tutelle and the Conseil de Famille (Family Council) which handled mostly inheritance cases involving minors whose parents died and left an inheritance, and not cases involving minors liberated from slavery. The chapter also examines cases where family members, acquaintances, and former owners of minors sought to reclaim them through appeals to the Conseil de Tutelle. It ends with the council’s placement of orphans, some of free status, in tutelle, and the end of the Conseil de Tutelle as a body governing guardianship.

The formulas not only tell us about how people in the formulas’ world understood family relationships, but also sometimes reveal hints of how they felt about them. The formulas focus above all on the nuclear family. A good number of them deal with inheritance, in a variety of permutations that reveal tension as well as concord within families. Others deal with different kinds of property arrangements among members of families, including people who had been adopted into families. Still others highlight the needs and emotions that could drive family behavior. A number of formulas deal with those who had lost their families, namely orphans. The formulas dealing with family matters have a great deal to say about the lives of lay women in this world. Women appear not simply as passive objects in the arrangements reached by their male relatives and husbands, but as active agents who participated fully in the documentary culture around them. Some of the formulas that involve them also reveal that while the dominant norms disadvantaged women in the inheritance of property, those norms could be and frequently were breached in practice, even when they were framed in terms of law.

Chapter 11 looks at Rosemary Taylor and Ellen Moir, the leading Australian humanitarians during the Vietnam War. Both were staunch advocates of inter-country adoption and supported evacuating war orphans to Australia, the United States and other countries. This created great debate and controversy at the time. Rosemary Taylor was one of the most prominent and high-profile humanitarians over the course of the history of child refugees and humanitarianism. She arrived in Saigon in 1967 as an educational social worker with a refugee service sponsored by the Australian Council of Churches. Taylor’s efforts in Vietnam with child refugees and orphanages captured the attention of the press, which called the children ‘Rosemary’s babies’. Acting as an informal liaison officer for orphanages across Vietnam, she was involved with the infamous Babylift of 1975, in which several hundred children were flown out of Vietnam to Australia – some for adoption by Australian families. Ellen Moir, a staunch advocate for inter-country adoption, was involved in smuggling five orphans into Australia without permits or documents in 1972, and worked with Taylor to attempt to expand the possibility of Australians adopting Vietnamese War orphans. Moir lobbied government agencies to allow children to enter the country. The role of humanitarian activists such as Taylor and Moir working largely outside of organised bodies led to a form of humanitarian activism which was at times ad hoc, chaotic and strident, and which allowed them to advocate for inter-country adoption to be seen as a solution to the increase in the number of child refugees and war orphans.

This chapter examines the relationships between volunteerism and religion, between youth activism and Islamic charity. During the reign of King ʿAbdallah, informal groups that advocated volunteering flourished among youth in Saudi Arabia. The rise of youth activism in Saudi Arabia is tied to the rise of social media.

At the heart of this chapter is the Young Initiative Group (YIG), an informal organization that grew out of the efforts of youth who distributed meals during Ramadan 2009. The chapter explores how the YIG negotiated alternative forms of belonging and community through charity work. The YIG embedded its volunteering practices within the religious obligation of alms and compassion for the needy. The group’s community approach was rooted in an Islamic ethics of care. This appeared to be both a reflection of the personal religiosity of some of its founders and strategic positioning vis-à-vis the authorities, given the initiative’s lack of legal status. The YIG’s rhetorical emphasis on family-like relations among volunteers, together with a critique of consumption patterns and references to Islamic norms of benevolence, created an apolitical profile of a group that promoted social reform.

At 1.5- and five-year follow-ups after the Spitak earthquake, there was a significant dose–response relation between earthquake exposure and severity of PTSD and depression. The more severely exposed Spitak group had higher PTSD and depression scores than the less severely exposed group from Gumri. However, at twenty-five years, this relation had dissipated. PTSD severity of the Spitak group that had experienced comparatively fewer post-earthquake adversities (lack of heat, electricity, food, medicine, housing, transportation) and post-earthquake traumatic experiences (e.g., fights, accidents) was comparable to that of the Gumri group; while depression severity of the Gumri group, which had been significantly lower than the Spitak group at baseline, was higher at follow-up. The detrimental impact of adversities was greater for depression than for PTSD.

Risk factors for PTSD and depression at twenty-five years included adversities, baseline PTSD and separation anxiety severity, loss of home, and chronic medical illnesses. Social support by family and friends emerged as a protective factor. Compared with those who lost one parent and controls, orphans were at greater risk for clinical depression. Although there was a decrease in PTSD rates from baseline to twenty-five years post-earthquake (48% to 22%), earthquake-related PTSD remained a significant public health problem. Alleviation of adversities, improving the social ecology, and monitoring chronic medical illnesses should be considered essential components of disaster recovery programs.

In a competitive environment, helping others at a cost presents a puzzle. Nonetheless, altruistic behaviour has been associated with human success as a species. Adoption, the provision of alloparental care to an orphan by an individual other than the biological mother, is a potential altruistic act in both humans and chimpanzees. We investigated potential benefits of adoption (like kin selection, improved reputation, or recruitment of allies) in a chimpanzee community with high adoption rates and alloparental care by adult males, who typically provide no paternal care to offspring. The probability of an adult male providing care to an orphan was connected to the grooming relationship/bond between male and mother before her passing and was not influenced by orphan sex or relatedness. The probability of positively interacting with orphans was negatively affected by the number of female bystanders. Results suggest that male–orphan interactions are not solely driven by reputation, ally recruitment, or kin selection and highlight the link between highly prosocial behaviours and social closeness.