Ravished Armenia (full title: Ravished Armenia: The Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl, Who Survived the Great Massacres) is a book written in 1918 by Arshaluys (Aurora) Mardiganian about her experiences in the Armenian Genocide. The story starts in 1915 when Arshaluys was 14 years old. She personally witnessed the murder of her father, mother, brothers and sisters. She was taken to the harem of a number of Turkish pashas, but had remained attached to her Christian Armenian faith despite being tortured repeatedly at the hands of her captors. She found refuge with Frederick W. MacCallum, a Canadian doctor and missionary stationed with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), who safely returned her to Erzurum, which had come under Russian control. She later moved to Tbilisi (Tiflis) in the Caucasus and, through the mediation of General Andranik Ozanian and orders of the Russian military leadership in the Caucasus, was sent to the United States for recovery and to bear witness to the sufferings of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
This book tells Aurora Mardiganian's life story as she relays it to a movie director and screen writer prior to the making of the movie, "Auction of souls." It is written as a cartoon, with color sequences displaying her life story from the past, interspersed with black and white sequences displaying her dialogue with the movie director and screen writer.
A New York Times bestseller, The Burning Tigris is “a vivid and comprehensive account” (Los Angeles Times) of the Armenian Genocide and America’s response. Award-winning, critically acclaimed author Peter Balakian presents a riveting narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Turkish government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling, he resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history. Awarded the Raphael Lemkin Prize for the best scholarly book on genocide by the Institute for Genocide Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center. “Timely and welcome. . . an overwhelmingly convincing retort to genocide deniers.” —New York Times Book Review “A story of multiplying horror and betrayal. . . . What happened to the Armenians in Turkey was a harbinger of the Holocaust and of the waves of modern mass murder that have swept the world ever since.” —Boston Globe “Encourages America to tap into a forgotten well of knowledge about the genocide and to revive its powerful impulse toward humanitarianism.” —New York Newsday
The first English-language biography of the de facto ruler of the late Ottoman Empire and architect of the Armenian Genocide, Talaat Pasha (1874-1921) led the triumvirate that ruled the late Ottoman Empire during World War I and is arguably the father of modern Turkey. He was also the architect of the Armenian Genocide, which would result in the systematic extermination of more than a million people, and which set the stage for a century that would witness atrocities on a scale never imagined. Here is the first biography in English of the revolutionary figure who not only prepared the way for Ataturk and the founding of the republic in 1923, but who shaped the modern world as well. In this explosive book, Hans-Lukas Kieser provides a mesmerizing portrait of a man who maintained power through a potent blend of the new Turkish ethno-nationalism, the political Islam of former Sultan Abdulhamid II, and a readiness to employ radical "solutions" and violence. From Talaat's role in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to his exile from Turkey and assassination--a sensation in Weimar Germany--Kieser restores the Ottoman drama to the heart of world events. He shows how Talaat wielded far more power than previously realized, making him the de facto ruler of the empire. He brings wartime Istanbul vividly to life as a thriving diplomatic hub, and reveals how Talaat's cataclysmic actions would reverberate across the twentieth century. In this major work of scholarship, Kieser tells the story of the brilliant and merciless politician who stood at the twilight of empire and the dawn of the age of genocide.
A landmark study of Turkish involvement in the Armenian genocide: A “groundbreaking and lucid account by a prominent Turkish scholar” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In 1915, under the cover of a world war, some one million Armenians were killed through starvation, forced marches, exile, and mass acts of slaughter. Although Armenians and world opinion have held the Ottoman powers responsible, Turkey has consistently rejected claims of genocide. Now Turkish historian Taner Akçam has made extensive and unprecedented use of Ottoman and other sources to produce a scrupulous charge sheet against the Turkish authorities. The first scholar of any nationality to mine the significant evidence—in Turkish military and court records, parliamentary minutes, letters, and eyewitness accounts—Akçam follows the chain of events leading up to the killing and then reconstructs its systematic orchestration by coordinated departments of the Ottoman state, the ruling political parties, and the military. He also examines how Turkey succeeded in evading responsibility, pointing to competing international interests in the region, the priorities of Turkish nationalists, and the international community’s inadequate attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice.
This book investigates the historical evolution of 'humanitarian photography' - the mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries.
On April 24, 1915, Grigoris Balakian was arrested along with some 250 other leaders of Constantinople’s Armenian community. It was the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s systematic attempt to eliminate the Armenian people from Turkey—a campaign that continued through World War I and the fall of the empire. Over the next four years, Balakian would bear witness to a seemingly endless caravan of blood, surviving to recount his miraculous escape and expose the atrocities that led to over a million deaths. Armenian Golgotha is Balakian’s devastating eyewitness account—a haunting reminder of the first modern genocide and a controversial historical document that is destined to become a classic of survivor literature.
All people are equal, according to Thomas Jefferson, but all migrants are not. This volume looks at how they are distinguished in France, the United States, Turkey, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark made through history between migrants and how these were justified in policies and public debates. The chapters form a triptych, addressing in three clusters the problematization of questions such as 'who is a refugee', 'who is family' and 'what is difference'. The chapters in this volume show that these are not separate issues. They intersect in ways that vary according to countries of origin and settlement, economic climate, geopolitical situation, as well as by gender, and by class, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation of the migrants.