Dispatches
Relief Workers
In the Footsteps of a Saint: Life at Corinth Orphanage
In June 1923, Emma Cushman stepped off a boat at Corinth with thousands of children in her care. Half had caught malaria during the evacuation from Anatolia. The town receiving them, a sleepy port of six thousand, was almost as...
Leviathan, 1919: Near East Relief’s Pioneering Mission
On February 16, 1919, the troopship Leviathan steamed out of New York harbor carrying two hundred and fifty doctors, nurses, teachers, and builders bound for the postwar Near East. They were the first large American relief delegation to enter Turkey...
“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...
“To Be Thrown Out Into the World”: The Nellie Miller Mann Collection
A Mennonite relief worker’s account of the children at NER’s Beirut headquarters and the orphanages along the Lebanese coast, drawn from letters and photos she sent home between 1921 and 1923.
Susan B. Anthony’s Nieces
Among the relief workers who sailed for the Near East in the first months of 1919 were two sisters from Berkeley, California: Gertrude Anthony, a 46-year-old teacher of biology and botany, and her sister Amy, a 50-year-old trained nurse. They...
Athens: Henry Morgenthau & the Refugee Commission
In late 1923, the League of Nations appointed Henry Morgenthau chairman of the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission. Morgenthau had served as U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916; his cables to Washington had become some of the...