|
About the Founder: Edwin Ginn |
For more information about Edwin Ginn, see Robert I. Rotberg's biography, A Leadership for Peace: How Edwin Ginn Tried to Change the World, which details how a self-made man and textbook publisher came to be one of the foremost leaders in America's early peace |
|
|
Edwin Ginn was a successful Boston publisher whose imagination and fortune helped establish the World Peace Foundation and whose spirit has sustained the organization through the years. In 1838, Ginn was born into "blessed poverty" on a small farm near Orland, Maine. Following his graduation from Tufts University twenty-four years later, Ginn began what would become an extremely lucrative career selling schoolbooks. He quickly discovered he had a gift for marketing, and in 1868 founded Ginn & Co., a company from which he reaped financial rewards and gained societal influence as one of the leading textbook publishers in the country. A great factor in Ginn's life was Edward Everett Hale, a pastor of Boston's South Congregational Church, a champion of peace, and a noted orator. Through Hale, Ginn developed a great interest in international arbitration and dedicated himself to the cause and the possibility of peace. In 1910, Ginn founded an International School of Peace in Boston whose purpose was to educate "the people of all nations to a full knowledge of the waste and destruction of war and of preparation for war, its evil effects on present social conditions and on the well-being of future generations and to promote international justice and the brotherhood of man..." Later that year, the School was converted into the World Peace Foundation.
|
|
