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The previously unpublished memoir of social worker Charles
Schermerhorn offers new and eye-opening source material pertaining
to the epicenter of the early Cold War: northern Greece. This book
brings this memoir to light to enrich the discussion about the
Greek Civil War and the late 1940s, through the highly perceptive
views of a firsthand observer of the turmoil. Schermerhorn’s
writings speak most compellingly to the power of human agency amid
adverse sociopolitical circumstances. His memoir takes a
child-centered and social-historical approach to the controversial
events, filling a great void in our knowledge. This book looks at a
single mid-twentieth-century crisis in multidimensional ways, as a
moral, material, social, and institutional calamity that mobilized
a motley crew of actors, from new humanitarian aid organizations to
press agents, from soldiers to destitute repeat-refugees, from
fledgling modern missionaries to foreign diplomats and economic
strategists. It was Schermerhorn’s unique achievement to interact
with them all, seeking common ground in the arduous task of trying
to improve living conditions for children and rural families. But
he also realized how easily foreign aid could become a tool of
political power and expediency. Focusing on the Greek Civil War,
this book will interest readers studying the Cold War, the heated
peripheries of proxy wars, and the devastating social fallout of
conflicts raging in areas hidden from public view. The global
history of humanitarian crises is a burgeoning field, and
Schermerhorn was the first to place Greek children and villagers,
who themselves left hardly any sources behind, at the center of
this urgent and ever-relevant debate.
Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire explores two key
historical episodes that have generally escaped the notice of
modern Greece, the Near East, and their observers alike. In the
midst of the highly charged context of West-East confrontation and
with fundamental cultural and political issues at stake, these
episodes prove to be exciting and important platforms from which to
reexamine the age-old conflict. This book reaches beyond the
standard sources to dig into the archives for important events that
have fallen through the cracks of the study of emerging modern
Greece and the Ottoman Empire. These events, in which French travel
writing, literary fiction, antiquarianism, and nineteenth-century
western and eastern geopolitics merge, invite us to redraw the
outlines of mutually dependent Hellenism and Orientalism.
"Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire" explores two key
historical episodes that have generally escaped the notice of
modern Greece, the Near East, and their observers alike. In the
midst of the highly charged context of West-East confrontation and
with fundamental cultural and political issues at stake, these
episodes prove to be exciting and important platforms from which to
reexamine the age-old conflict. This book reaches beyond the
standard sources to dig into the archives for important events that
have fallen through the cracks of the study of emerging modern
Greece and the Ottoman Empire. These events, in which French travel
writing, literary fiction, antiquarianism, and nineteenth-century
western and eastern geopolitics merge, invite us to redraw the
outlines of mutually dependent Hellenism and Orientalism.
Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is the first book to study
the biopolitics of the mass adoption movement of children and
youngsters from Greece to the U.S. starting in the 1950s. The
children of Greece were caught in the crossfire of a tumultuous
civil war, as both sides of the conflict effected the forced
removal of children to internment camps and schools of various
kinds. The book presents a committed quest to unravel and document
the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek
children in the U.S.United States, in a movement accelerated by the
aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the
global Cold War. Greek-to-American adoptions and, regrettably,
their transgressions, provided the blueprint for the first
large-scale international adoptions, before a mass phenomenon
typically associated with Asian children. The story of these Greek
postwar and Cold War adoptions, whose procedures ranged from legal
to highly irregular, has never been told or analyzed before. This
book aims to fill that gap, also for the uncounted adoptees and
their descendants whose lives are still affected today.
This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the
postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek
children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the
aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the
global Cold War. Greek-to-American adoptions and, regrettably, also
their transactions and transgressions, provided the blueprint for
the first large-scale international adoptions, well before these
became a mass phenomenon typically associated with Asian children.
The story of these Greek postwar and Cold War adoptions, whose
procedures ranged from legal to highly irregular, has never been
told or analyzed before. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece
answers the important questions: How did these adoptions from
Greece happen? Was there any money involved? Humanitarian rescue or
kid pro quo? Or both? With sympathy and perseverance, Gonda Van
Steen has filled a decades-long gap in our understanding, and
provided essential information to the hundreds of adoptees and
their descendants whose lives are still affected today.
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