“Those Promising Young Men and Women Upon Whom Will Fall the Scientific Leadership of the Future”: Building a Database for the International Fellows and Scholars of the Rockefeller Foundation Training Programs (1917-1970)

This paper discusses the characteristics and potential of RF-DirectoryDB, a database created to support prosopographical studies. The database is populated with information from the Directory of Fellowships and Scholarships (1917-1970), a Rockefeller Foundation publication that compiled data on the academic training and careers of 9,057 scholarship recipients from various countries and fields of knowledge. The article begins with an overview of the Rockefeller Foundation scholarship programs, relevant historiographical discussion, and a description of the source material, the Directory. Next, it addresses the technical challenges involved in constructing the database and the resulting limitations. Finally, the text demonstrates the database’s application with a preliminary analysis of a group of Latin American fellows specializing in agricultural research.