Dispatches
Genocide & Political History
“We Had Nothing Left” (Erivan)
A gaunt man staggered out of the mountains and into Erivan in the early spring of 1922. He could barely speak. He pointed back the way he had come, where eighty-six children were rationing their food at thirty-two beans each...
Persia, 1914–1925: U.S. Consular Reporting on the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides
The U.S. consular records of Persia document a quarter-century in which Assyrian and Armenian Christians in the country’s northwest were repeatedly caught between Ottoman, Russian, Kurdish, and Persian forces, and in which American diplomats became, by default, the principal humanitarian...
Baghdad, 1917–1923: U.S. Consular Reporting on the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides
In late summer 1918, Jacob David joined the mass exodus from Urmia in northwestern Persia. His wife, Judith, and their three children stayed behind to safeguard the few Assyrians who remained in the area. Presbyterian missionaries had educated him in...
The Smyrna Catastrophe
By the morning of September 13, 1922, the long unraveling of the Ottoman Empire had reached the waterfront of Smyrna. A fire that began in the Armenian quarter of the city that day would consume two-thirds of Smyrna within a...