American large-scale foundations emerged at the beginning in the early 20thC and gradually expanded on an international scale, becoming core agents of the 'American Century'. Various Carnegie philanthropies and the Rockefeller Foundation enlarged their agendas from ad hoc charitable programs to highly professionalized interventions and from a domestic to a transatlantic not to say global scale. After Word War II they were joined by the Ford Foundation that explicitly used its extensive resources to promote American-style democracy and decidedly western values world-wide. Improved scientific knowledge and understanding, embedded in a tissue of social relations that tied centre to periphery, became one preferred instrument to export American ideas and models abroad to improve the human condition and to ward off rival ideologies. US philanthropic initiatives and multifarious research activities sponsored around the world ultimately revolved around embedding knowledge in all its forms in international political, social and cultural power alignments. The contributions in this volume link the production and circulation of knowledge promoted by US philanthropy to a broader 20th century inter- or transnational history, shaped not only by such fundamental processes as interwar Wilsonian Internationalism and Cold War bloc antagonisms, but also by both US and European late colonialism and development and, not least of all, by modernization ideologies that were not monopolized by the US or the northern hemisphere but virtually proliferated throughout the world.