Turkey and the Armenian atrocities
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Release date is 2026-02-16
Peter Becker, Seth Siefken and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Peter Becker, Seth Siefken and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
"Turkey and the Armenian atrocities" by Edwin Munsell Bliss is a historical account written in the late 19th century. It investigates the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian massacres, setting recent atrocities against a long background of political, religious, and social forces, and drawing on missionary reports, eyewitness testimony, and scholarly sources. The work addresses the roles of the Sultan and his officials, Kurdish auxiliaries, European power politics, and humanitarian efforts such as the Red Cross.
The opening of the volume features an impassioned introduction by Frances E. Willard condemning the Armenian persecutions, calling Christian nations to act, and praising Clara Barton’s Red Cross mission and the courage of American missionaries. A measured preface then explains the book’s aim: to trace the complex influences—religious, ethnic, diplomatic, and personal—that produced the crisis, with acknowledgments of key sources and collaborators. This is followed by a broad, fact-rich survey: geography and infrastructure of the empire (mountains, plains, scarce harbors, rough roads, limited railways), climate and economic life (agriculture, minerals, transport, khans), population estimates and distribution of peoples, languages in use, and a clear primer on Islam, its texts and sects, alongside outlines of Oriental Christian traditions. The excerpt closes as the narrative begins profiling the Turks themselves, moving from origins toward character traits. (This is an automatically generated summary.)