The persecution and suffering of the Armenian people, a
religious and cultural minority in the Ottoman Empire, reached a
peak in the era of World War I at the hands of the Turks. Between
1915 and 1925 as many as 1.5 million Armenian men, women, and
children died in Ottoman Turkey, victims of execution, starvation,
and death marches to the Syrian desert.
In ""Starving Armenians,"" Merrill Peterson explores the
American response to these atrocities, beginning with the initial
reports to President Wilson from his Ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire, Henry Morgenthau, who described Turkey as "a place of
horror." The West gradually began to take notice. As the "New York
Times" carried stories about the "slow massacre of a race," public
outrage over this tragedy led to an unprecedented philanthropic
crusade spearheaded by Near East Relief, an organization rooted in
Protestant missionary endeavors in the Near East and dedicated to
saving the survivors of the first genocide of the twentieth
century. The book also addresses the Armenian aspirations for an
independent republic under American auspices; these hopes went
unfulfilled in the peacemaking after the war and ended altogether
when Armenia was absorbed into the Soviet Union.
Part of a generation who were admonished as children to
"remember the starving Armenians," Peterson went to Armenia in 1997
as a Peace Corps volunteer and became fascinated by the country's
troubled history. The extensive research he embarked upon
afterwards revealed not only the scope of the people's hardship and
amazing resilience; it located in the American effort to help the
Armenians a unique perspective on our own nation's experience of
the twentieth century. "Starving Armenians" is an eloquent
narrative of an all but forgotten part of that experience.
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