After a successful fundraising campaign, the Church of Christ mission was able to purchase two buildings, in Milan and Rome, and expand its operations to Italy’s two main cities as well as other parts of the country. The decision to open a prayer hall in the heart of Rome, in the Prati neighborhood near the prominent Sacro Cuore di Cristo Re parish and just a few minutes from Vatican City, was particularly bold and controversial. The Catholic Church, along with its numerous allies in the Italian government and parliament, reacted harshly, condemning the move as another intolerable provocation. In September 1952, the Ministry of the Interior launched a crackdown on the mission’s activities as well as those of other Protestant groups. Several of the mission’s churches were shut down, and police were dispatched to prevent access to them. As in the “stoning” crisis of 1950, many members of Congress in the United States responded forcefully, viewing and portraying the crackdown as an unacceptable infringement on the fundamental right to religious freedom and a violation of both the 1948 US–Italian bilateral treaty and the Italian constitution.

There are three ways of becoming a shareholder: by subscribing to a new issue of shares in a company; by purchasing shares from an existing shareholder; or by transmission of ownership in shares due to the operation of law (for example, where shares are transferred to the beneficiary under a will). In this chapter, we focus on the first method: the issuing of shares and securities as a means of fundraising, commonly referred to as ‘raising capital’ or ‘equity raising’. The term ‘subscription’ describes the relationship where a company issues shares directly to a shareholder. The legal relationship between the company that issues and the shareholder who subscribes for new shares can be analysed using the contractual rules of offer and acceptance.

Our primary focus in this chapter is the issue of securities by public companies. Generally speaking, only public companies are permitted to raise capital by issuing securities to a broad cross-section of the public.

This chapter traces how payments made by the laity to the Church changed across the nineteenth century. A brief discussion of the total amount of money given to the Church in the period, and of various attempts to formally regulate dues and fees on the part of the state, the Church, and sections of the laity, is followed by the analysis of some of the most fundamental, day-to-day methods of funding the Church and its personnel. This chapter traces first, at parish level, the evolution of Easter and Christmas dues payments and pew rents. Second, the varied funding of a raft of religious orders that emerged and grew in the period will be dealt with. Finally, the use of Sunday collections of various kinds and their connection to emerging national and international Catholic funding campaigns will be discussed. The key argument here is that this enormous diversification of the Church’s fundraising was a response to changes in the broader economy, including increased access to cash and growing consumption opportunities on the part of the laity.

This chapter explores the emergence, from the 1860s, of lotteries as a crucial fundraising tool for the Irish Catholic Church, one especially used to acquire capital to construct its rapidly growing built infrastructure. The chapter establishes the scale of the ‘drawings of prizes’ phenomenon, before arguing that lotteries worked effectively as a fundraising mechanism because they facilitated broad class engagement among the laity at home and held transnational appeal to the diaspora and non-Catholics alike. This chapter finally traces the roles of sectarian tensions, social and economic change, and legal limits in the gradual decline of such lotteries by the 1910s.

Blockchain-based fundraising transforms the way issuers raise capital from the public, promising to reduce transaction costs, expand financial access, and reshape issuer-investor interactions. Despite these promises, the blockchain finance market is currently plagued by severe asymmetric information and is rife with fraudulent and low-quality issuers who exploit this friction. This chapter explores the reasons for the severe asymmetric information in this market and discusses the extent to which signaling and analysts can address it. It suggests that the effectiveness of signaling is limited due to the low costs of producing and disseminating signals and investors' inability to verify biased signals ex ante and punish biased signals ex post. These limitations make analysts a vital source for reducing asymmetric information but they, too, appear to suffer from significant problems – ranging from conflicts of interest to lack of transparency to low competence and expertise – which hinder their effectiveness in reducing asymmetric information. The chapter concludes with the policy implications arising from these observations, which can also guide policy-makers in addressing emerging blockchain-based fundraising mechanisms, such as non-fungible token (NFT) offerings.

Mastering the art of compelling communication can be a passport to success, as this introduction explains.

Apple Computer, Inc. released its “Think Different” campaign in 1997 to mark the return of Steve Jobs and to resurrect the struggling computer company. The Think Different campaign “got an audience that once thought of Apple as semi-cool, but semi-stupid to suddenly think about the brand in a whole new way.”1 Interestingly, be different is what Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) embraced and practiced from its beginning in 1983. The Bank distinguished itself from the crowded banking sector by serving entrepreneurs in the region since the early 1980s. At the time SVB was formed and officially named, “Silicon Valley” was considered unattractive for banking to capture the public attention and adopted the available moniker.

This chapter demonstrates how, whilst classical theatre was largely side-lined by the necessities and appetites of a new wartime culture, Shakespeare, followed an entirely opposite trajectory, rising even higher following a century of increasing British bardolatry. In considering the popularity of Shakespeare during the war the chapter considers the context of the Tercentenary, the Shakespeare Hut, and the use of Shakespeare for fundraising. It shows how throughout the war Shakespeare was used as a patriotic tool in performances both at home and at the front. In examining these performances the chapter also emphasises how Shakespeare would mix with comedy skits, and classical themes of royal demise or the rise and fall of empires would appear in snappy one act-ers. In considering classical theatre more broadly, the chapter shows how classical themes and narratives were drawn on to make sense of war. It focuses in particular on new plays which took up classical themes or modes such as Drinkwater’s X=0 and Masefield’s Philip the King and shows how the use of the classics changed as the war progressed. Overall the chapter shows how the war catalysed already changing attitudes to the divisions between high and low culture

Higher education in the United States advanced democracy during the much of the twentieth century by fostering social mobility and by deepening students’ understanding of democratic citizenship, as well as strengthening their capacity to participate in a democratic polity. Concurrently, higher education enjoyed widespread esteem in the United States, while colleges and universities became highly stratified by financial capital, or endowment size, which was closely correlated with prestige. Yet, this financial stratification widened into a yawning "wealth gap" that precipitated a decline in public esteem near the end of the twentieth century. This historical chapter explains these developments and argues that wealth concentration in higher education and wealth inequality in the US population are interrelated, and this interrelationship weakens social mobility and democracy in the twenty-first century.

In 1962, Sikota Wina wrote a report on the United National Independence Party (UNIP) International Publicity Bureau, which had just opened an office in Dar es Salaam, capital of newly independent Tanganyika and liberation hub in the making. Chapter 6 asks how the anticolonial culture of this cohort fell away over the course of the staggered independence dates of Tanganyika, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia. Accra, having just begun to host liberation movements from around 1960, appeared unable to provide a platform for activists after Munu Sipalo’s stint on the editorial board of Voice of Africa. Cairo lost much of the appeal it held in John Kale’s heyday, as conflict over the legitimacy of political parties paralleled a crisis in office resources. Lobbying groups on the Western European Left grew irrelevant in a new funding landscape that came with the timetabling of statehood, while PAFMECA soon dissolved. The acceleration of independence negotiations in the region was ambivalent: this chapter closes by arriving in Dar es Salaam by way of radio broadcasting and technical training for Zambian secretaries – whose experience was not only one of anticolonial regional solidarity.

These articles represent a wide array of reporting in the Black press on social activities within the Black community.“Society” pages and local gossip columns provide an invaluable window into experiences of community life – including births, deaths, literary functions, and activities organized to support and sustain the papers themselves – that were, otherwise, rarely written into the historical record.For instance, readers sometimes turned to Black newspapers for help in locating missing family members. Contenders for leadership in Black organizations frequently criticized one another in the newspapers. Music and social dancing played a central role in coverage of community organizations. Dance parties could be celebrated as dignified and joyful or denounced as disreputable or unworthy. The interest that White compatriots took in Black dancing and music could be grounds for jubilation – signs that racial prejudice was eroding – for criticism of lax club leadership, for debates about whether to allow White men to attend dances in Black clubs, or for concern over performances of Carnival groups that reproduced harmful stereotypes.