Historical analysis of philanthropy and civil society is a valuable research method that provides useful assessments of the sector’s development and its evolving strengths and challenges. However, the historical philanthropic experiences and contributions of underrepresented populations are oftentimes neglected due to their marginalized status in historical archives and records. To correct this, we propose philanthropic archival layering as a historical methodology for recovering and investigating diverse forms of voluntary action in marginalized communities. In this paper, we focus on the philanthropic experiences of Afro-Caribbean civil society in the early twentieth century and African American women during Jim Crow. We review scholarship on the African Diaspora and historical research methodologies for analyzing the archives of marginalized peoples. We demonstrate this methodology through two case applications before outlining steps for conducting philanthropic archival layering as an innovative methodological framework that broadens the field’s knowledge about what constitutes philanthropy and who contributes to it.

对慈善事业和民间社会的历史分析是一种有价值的研究方法，可以对行业的发展及其不断发展的优势和挑战进行有用的评估。然而，由于在历史档案和记录中处于边缘地位，代表性不足的人群的历史慈善经历和贡献往往被忽视。为了纠正这一点，我们建议将慈善档案分层作为一种历史方法，用于恢复和调查边缘化社区中各种形式的志愿行动。在本文中，我们关注 20 世纪早期非裔加勒比公民社会和 Jim Crow 时期非裔美国女性的慈善经历。我们回顾了关于非洲侨民的学术研究和分析边缘化民族档案的历史研究方法。在概述进行慈善档案分层的步骤之前，我们通过两个案例应用展示了这种方法论，作为一种创新的方法论框架，拓宽了该领域关于慈善事业的构成及其贡献者的知识。