Clevelanders sometimes seem to have a "What have you done for me lately?" attitude with regard to John D. Rockefeller. As if the creation on the Cuyahoga's shores of one of the country's most powerful and influential corporations is not enough, some Clevelanders look to Rockefeller's enormous charitable giving and wonder why he built no major institution in Cleveland to provide jobs and world renown under the Rockefeller banner. Most people who express such opinions often point, with a hint of jealousy, to the University of Chicago as an example of Cleveland's missing Rockefeller landmark.

In 2011 I received a Rockefeller Grant-in-Aid for my project which enabled me to conduct a whirlwind trip to the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) to collect as much material as I could on the relationship between the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and Australian universities in the interwar period. After a couple of days of detailed reading and taking notes from a variety of sources, it soon became abundantly clear that the RAC holdings on this topic were so rich that even by limiting the topic I would not get through the material without the generous offer made to photocopy significant items. Ten days later I headed back to my university in Australia, filled with ideas about this topic and looking forward to reading the material in an even more contemplative manner. The large bundle of photocopied material joined me about a month later, and in the course of wrapping up marking and other duties for the year, I have yet to reflect fully on the implications of what I found. In the meantime however, I am offering an introductory report on some of my preliminary thoughts.

From the 1820s onwards, wealthy individuals, enterprises, and religious congregations across the United States provided funding for scholarship and student loan funds entrusted to colleges and universities. These funds often relied on an endowment to produce the funds necessary to support students in need of financial support. Furthermore, while most donors entrusted a university of their choice with their scholarship fund, there were also some scholarship funds such as the La Verne Noyes Scholarship Endowment Fund and the General Board of Education (GEB) that were created outside of the university. Prior to 1945, such funds were extremely rare, but they did exist. The La Verne Noyes Scholarship Endowment Fund, created as a trust in Chicago in 1919, was one of the earliest examples.

As a new branch of medicine, modern nursing was transplanted to China by missionaries through church-established medical schools and hospitals. As western medicine spread in China, the career of nursing took root, pullulated and bloomed. During this process, the School of Nursing at Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) played a crucial role since it started higher nursing education in China. Anna D. Wolf (1890-1985) was the first dean of the PUMC School of Nursing. It is very significant to carry out research on Wolf's work in Peking in order to understand the establishment of higher nursing education in China.

The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) archives show the strength of its post-World War I policy program to facilitate the development of European medical education and research, where possible, along the lines of the German full-time system recently embodied in the Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1914 Hopkins adopted full-time academic chairs in the clinical departments of Medicine, Paediatrics and Surgery. These new professors - like their colleagues in the University medical science departments - now orientated their entire professional lives around the university ethos of linked teaching and research. The Clinical Professors sought to bring this ethos into the hospital, and were geared toward the symbiotic co-development of laboratory-informed teaching, research and patient care, rather than private practice.

The concept of modern public health was introduced to China in the mid-19th century with the spread of Western medicine. In the early 1920s, dreaming to develop public health undertakings, John B. Grant came to China where he made public health education his top priority. In his early years in China, with great dedication, John Grant began to carry out various activities. He tried to influence government officials, spread public health knowledge among educational administrators, and created a public health program in the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC). Not only did these efforts effectively promote the circulation of public health knowledge in China, but they also laid a solid foundation and trained qualified personnel for the field's sustainable development.

The Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) awarded me a travel grant to do research at the RAC from June 23-30, 2010. I am working on a monograph which examines the experience and evolving meaning of education in one rural Georgia county (Hancock) from Reconstruction until the Brown decision of 1954. This new study builds on my earlier publication, The Rural Face of White Supremacy, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005, which was an examination of the daily experience of race relations in this plantation-belt county during the Jim Crow Era. The current research project will trace the contours of the debates over the meaning of education in the county, including black and white perspectives about what kind of education was best suited for the needs of whom. It also examines changes in the availability of education: the funding of teachers, the condition of schoolhouses, the length of terms, etc. Primarily, I want to know how ordinary black and white farmers of all classes understood the purpose of education during these decades. I want to understand how each generation within this period put their educations to use.

South Sudan's refugee children in Uganda face an education emergency. Uprooted from their homes by famine and violence, more than half a million have fled across the border into northern Uganda – one of the poorest parts of one of the world's poorest countries.

The Ugandan government has responded to the refugee crisis with extraordinary generosity. The same cannot be said of the international community.

Donor governments have funded just 17% of the UN appeal for the South Sudan refugee response in Uganda this year. The response to the education emergency that the refugee crisis has precipitated has bordered on derisory. Only a small fraction of the grossly inadequate $61.6m appeal for education has been delivered, denying the vast majority of children access to education.

This report challenges donor governments and international agencies to do better. It sets out a plan of action which, if implemented, could deliver good-quality universal pre-primary, primary and secondary education for South Sudanese refugee children in Uganda at an average cost of $132 million a year for three and a half years. It also points to possible sources for this financing.

Refugee children and their parents consistently identify education as a priority. They see schooling as a source of hope and opportunity – and they are right. It is time for the international community to listen to their voices.