Introduction

Just as the Memorial was developing programmes to provide financial support to major research centres and also many smaller projects woven together into research fields, the Memorial implemented strategies to help develop a few major research organizations. One project was to develop an organization to oversee a research focus on business cycles. The Memorial also helped build the intermediary organization: the Social Science Research Council. We can also return to an interest in the Memorial's support of research fields by considering some support of research in humane studies, and support of research at intersections between legal research and the social sciences. These last two research fields helped to define boundaries at the edges of the social sciences.

A Fellowships Programme

One way to assist the coordination between social sciences was to award research fellowships. Leadership at the Memorial developed methods for establishing fellowships programmes, covering a range of needs, both domestic and international. A fellowships programme is itself a kind of research organization.

One approach was to establish a programme to provide international fellowships. Such fellowships can serve multiple purposes, including enabling the movement of ideas, which in the early 1920s tended to still stay a bit provincial. In 1923, the Memorial created a fellowships programme to provide ‘direct fellowships’ to social scientists outside of the United States. The aim was to help researchers better develop their methods and approaches. The Memorial began in 1924 to award these fellowships in earnest.