Remembering the Armenian Genocide

Before Rwanda and Bosnia, and before the Holocaust, the first genocide of the twentieth century happened in Turkish Armenia in 1915, when approximately one million people were killed. This volume is an account of the American response to this atrocity. The first part sets up the framework for understanding the genocide: Sir Martin Gilbert, Vahakn Dadrian and Jay Winter provide an analytical setting for nine scholarly essays examining how Americans learned of this catastrophe and how they tried to help its victims. Knowledge and compassion, though, were not enough to stop the killings. A terrible precedent was born in 1915, one which has come to haunt the United States and other Western countries throughout the twentieth century and beyond. To read the essays in this volume is chastening: the dilemmas Americans faced when confronting evil on an unprecedented scale are not very different from the dilemmas we face today.

Armenian national identity has long been associated with what has come to be known as the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Immersing the reader in the history, culture and politics of Armenia - from its foundations as the ancient kingdom of Urartu to the modern-day Republic - Gaïdz Minassian moves past the massacres embedded in the Armenian psyche to position the nation within contemporary global politics. An in-depth study of history and memory, The Armenian Experience examines the characteristics and sentiments of a national identity that spans the globe. Armenia lies in the heart of the Caucasus and once had an empire - under the rule of Tigranes the Great in the first century BC - that stretched from the Caspian to the Mediterranean seas. Beginning with an overview of Armenia's historic position at the crossroads between Rome and Persia, Minassian details invasions from antiquity to modern times by Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, Persians and Russians right up to its Soviet experience, and drawing on Armenia's post-Soviet conflict with Azerbaijan in its attempts to reunify with the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. This book questions an Armenian self-identity dominated by its past and instead looks towards the future. Gaïdz Minassian emphasises the need to recognise that the Armenian story began well before the Genocide 1915, and continues as an on-going modern narrative.

This volume contains previously published material, which narrates and analyzes the Armenian massacres of 1894-1896, 1909, and 1915-1923. Background information and first person accounts of the events are provided as well, to give the reader a more rounded knowledge of the events. Charts and graphs are provided to summarize important statistical information, and timelines are included to help the reader trace the sequence of events. Maps provide details about the areas of contention, and locations of conflicts.

This essential reference work covers all aspects of the Armenian Genocide, including the causes, phases, and consequences. It explores political and historical perspectives as well as the cultural aspects. The carefully selected collection of perspective essays will inspire critical thinking and provide readers with insight into some of the most controversial and significant issues of the Armenian Genocide. Similarly, the primary source documents are prefaced by thoughtful introductions that will provide the necessary context to help students understand the significance of the material.

This short history sheds light on the slaughter and expulsion of ethnic Armenians during WWI with stories of those who witnesses the terror firsthand.   Twenty years before the start of Hitler's Holocaust, over 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Turkish state. They were crammed into cattle trucks and deported to camps, shot and buried in mass graves, or force-marched to death. It was described as a crime against humanity and Turkey was condemned by Russia, France, Great Britain and the United States. But two decades later the genocide had been conveniently forgotten. Hitler justified his Polish death squads by asking in 1939: 'Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?'   In Armenian Genocide, historian David Charlwood presents a gripping short history of a forgotten genocide. With vivid eyewitness accounts, this volume recalls the men and women who died, the few who survived, and the diplomats who tried to intervene.

In this tenth anniversary edition of his award-winning memoir, New York Times bestselling author Peter Balakian has expanded his compelling story about growing up in the baby-boom suburbs of the '50s and '60s and coming to understand what happened to his family in the first genocide of the twentieth century--the Ottoman Turkish government's extermination of more than one million Armenians in 1915. In this new edition, Balakian continues his exploration of the Armenian Genocide with new chapters about his journey to Aleppo and his trip to the Der Zor desert of Syria in his pursuit of his grandmother's life, bringing us closer to the twentieth century's first genocide.

Through powerful first-person accounts, scholarly analysis, and compelling narrative, Century of Genocidedetails the causes and ramifications of the genocides perpetrated in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Historical context provides the necessary background on the actors and victims to help us better understand these episodes of atrocious political violence. The third edition has been carefully updated and features new chapters on the genocides in Darfur, in Guatemala, and against indigenous peoples the world over. The volume concludes with a consideration of the methods of prevention and intervention of future genocides.

Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam is the first collection of essays by recognized scholars primarily in the field of religious studies to address this timely topic. In addition to theoretical thinking about both religion and genocide and the relationship between the two, these authors look at the tragedies of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Sudan from their own unique vantage point. In so doing, they supply a much needed additional contribution to the ongoing conversations proffered by historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and legal scholars regarding prevention, intervention, and punishment.

In a culture that often understands formal experimentation or theoretical argument to be antithetical to pleasure, Atom Egoyan has nevertheless consistently appealed to wide audiences around the world. If films like The Adjuster, Calendar, Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter have ensured him international cult status as one of the most revered of all contemporary directors, Egoyan's forays into installation art and opera have provided evidence of his versatility and confirmed his talents. Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan is both scholarly and accessible. Indispensable for the scholar, student, and fan, this collection of new essays and interviews from leading film and media scholars unpacks the central arguments, tensions, and paradoxes of his work and traces their evolution. It also locates his work within larger intellectual and artistic currents in order to consider how he takes up and answers critical debates in politics, philosophy, and aesthetics. Most importantly, it addresses how his work is both intellectually engaging and emotionally moving.

They found him inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indigo dye two shades darker than the summer sky. His arms and chin were propped over the copper edge, but the rest of Kemal Türkoglu, age ninety-three, had turned a pretty pale blue. When Orhan's brilliant and eccentric grandfather, who built a dynasty out of making kilim rugs, is found dead in a vat of dye, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But his grandfather's will raises more questions than it answers. Kemal has left the family estate to a stranger thousands of miles away, an aging woman in a retirement home in Los Angeles. Her existence and secrecy about her past only deepen the mystery of why Orhan's grandfather would have left their home to this woman rather than to his own family. Intent on righting this injustice, Orhan boards a plane to Los Angeles. There, over many meetings, he will unearth the story that eighty-seven-year-old Seda so closely guards--the story that, if told, has the power to undo the legacy upon which Orhan's family is built, the story that could unravel Orhan's own future. Moving between the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the 1990s, Orhan's Inheritance is a story of passionate love, unspeakable horrors, incredible resilience, and the hidden stories that haunt a family.

Ravished Armenia tells the tragic and horrific story of Aurora Mardiganian, a young Armenian woman fleeing genocide as a refugee. This edition includes the five original illustrations. Published in 1918, not long after the author escaped from Turkey, we benefit from the rawness of Aurora's memories. Although the book is not pleasant reading, it opens the reader's eyes to the horrors of genocide and how quickly the worst tendencies of man can erupt and cause abysmal suffering.

Reigns of Terror is a study of states that have committed gross human rights crimes against their own citizens. Patricia Marchak seeks to discover whether these states have anything in common - whether there are preconditions that can be identified as leading to crimes against humanity so that the world community could take preventive action in similar situations elsewhere. She provides short histories of nine culturally and historically diverse societies where such crimes occurred during the twentieth century, including the Ottoman Empire in Armenia, the USSR in the Eastern Ukraine, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Burundi, Rwanda, Argentina, Chile, and Yugoslavia.

The Resistance Network is the history of an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria who helped save the lives of thousands during the Armenian Genocide. Khatchig Mouradian challenges depictions of Armenians as passive victims of violence and subjects of humanitarianism, demonstrating the key role they played in organizing a humanitarian resistance against the destruction of their people. Piecing together hundreds of accounts, official documents, and missionary records, Mouradian presents a social history of genocide and resistance in wartime Aleppo and a network of transit and concentration camps stretching from Bab to Ras ul-Ain and Der Zor. He ultimately argues that, despite the violent and systematic mechanisms of control and destruction in the cities, concentration camps, and massacre sites in this region, the genocide of the Armenians did not progress unhindered--unarmed resistance proved an important factor in saving countless lives.

Genocide, mass murder and human rights abuses are arguably the most perplexing and deeply troubling aspects of recent world history. This collection of essays by leading international experts offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and analyses of multiple cases of genocide and genocidal acts, with a focus on the twentieth century. The book contains studies of the Armenian genocide, the victims of Stalinist terror, the Holocaust, and Imperial Japan. Several authors explore colonialism and address the fate of the indigenous peoples in Africa, North America, and Australia. As well, there is extensive coverage of the post-1945 period, including the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, East Timor, and Guatemala. The book emphasizes the importance of comparative analysis and theoretical discussion, and it raises new questions about the difficult challenges for modernity constituted by genocide and other mass crimes.

A rare and poignant testimony of a survivor of the Armenian genocide. The twentieth century was an era of genocide, which started with the Turkish destruction of more than one million Armenian men, women, and children--a modern process of total, violent erasure that began in 1895 and exploded under the cover of the First World War. John Minassian lived through this as a teenager, witnessing the murder of his own kin, concealing his identity as an orphan and laborer in Syria, and eventually immigrating to the United States to start his life anew. A rare testimony of a survivor of the Armenian genocide, one of just a handful of accounts in English, Minassian's memoir is breathtaking in its vivid portraits of Armenian life and culture and poignant in its sensitive recollections of the many people who harmed and helped him. As well as a searing testimony, his memoir documents the wartime policies and behavior of Ottoman officials and their collaborators; the roles played by the British, French, and Indian armies, as well as American missionaries; and the ultimate collapse of the empire. The author's journey, and his powerful story of perseverance, despair, and survival will resonate with readers today.