The book discusses the influence missionaries and philanthropists had on American foreign policy and diplomacy in the Near East up to and shortly following World War I.

Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion surveys two thousand years of the Christian missionary enterprise in the Middle East within the context of the region's political evolution. Its broad, rich narrative follows Christian missions as they interacted with imperial powers and as the momentum of religious change shifted from Christianity to Islam and back, adding new dimensions to the history of the region and the nature of the relationship between the Middle East and the West. Historians and political scientists increasingly recognize the importance of integrating religion into political analysis, and this volume, using long-neglected sources, uniquely advances this effort. It surveys Christian missions from the earliest days of Christianity to the present, paying particular attention to the role of Christian missions, both Protestant and Catholic, in shaping the political and economic imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon delineate the ongoing tensions between conversion and the focus on witness and "good works" within the missionary movement, which contributed to the development and spread of nongovernmental organizations. Through its conscientious, systematic study, this volume offers an unparalleled encounter with the social, political, and economic consequences of such trends.

From the early phases of modern missions, Christian missionaries supported many humanitarian activities, mostly framed as subservient to the preaching of Christianity. This anthology contributes to a historically grounded understanding of the complex relationship between Christian missions and the roots of humanitarianism and its contemporary uses in a Middle Eastern context. Contributions focus on ideologies, rhetoric, and practices of missionaries and their apostolates towards humanitarianism, from the mid-19th century Middle East crises, examining different missionaries, their society’s worldview and their networks in various areas of the Middle East. In the early 20th century Christian missions increasingly paid more attention to organisation and bureaucratisation (‘rationalisation’), and media became more important to their work. The volume analyses how non-missionaries took over, to a certain extent, the aims and organisations of the missionaries as to humanitarianism. It seeks to discover and retrace such ‘entangled histories’ for the first time in an integral perspective. Contributors include: Beth Baron, Philippe Bourmaud, Seija Jalagin, Nazan Maksudyan, Michael Marten, Heleen (L.) Murre-van den Berg, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Idir Ouahes, Maria Chiara Rioli, Karène Sanchez Summerer, Bertrand Taithe, and Chantal Verdeil

How missionaries and evangelical politics influenced American government policy in the Middle East.

This book presents a colourful and analytical picture of Turkish-American relations from the early nineteenth century to the post cold war era, providing excellent reference for study of their impact as well as for a deeper understanding of the region.

This bibliography, first published in 1990, is a result of a quarter-century professional and personal relationship between two academics interested in Middle East studies. The comprehensive bibliography consists of western, primarily English, language sources published through 1988 and early 1989 concerning foreign policy toward the Middle East and North Africa during the twentieth century. Included are materials that deal directly with the topic, material that has appeared in published form, ie books, monographs, essays and articles. Also included are some non-published items, most importantly American and British doctoral dissertations and master’s theses.

To See A Promised Land explores the fascination that Americans historically have had with the land of the Bible. By focusing on the period before World War I, Lester Vogel uncovers the various ways in which Americans (primarily Protestants) typically thought about and knew the Holy Land prior to the land's politicization and embroilment in the conflict between Arab and Jewish national interests. During this period, there were literally hundreds of popular books, pamphlets, and articles about the Holy Land available to American readers. Although most Americans never visited the Middle East, they nevertheless had distinct images of what the land was like through these writings, their churches, and their own reading of the Bible. On the very day of his assassination in 1865, even President Lincoln contemplated a tour of the Holy Land at the end of his term in office. Americans who did travel to the Middle East took with them preconceptions and brought back with them descriptions that, in turn, helped to reshape continually the popular image of the Holy Land. One of the most celebrated journeys to the East was the 1867 "Quaker City Tour," immortalized by Mark Twain in his Innocents Abroad. Vogel suggests that this unique relationship between Americans and a foreign land might be seen as an expression of "geopiety," a term coined by the geographer John Kirtland Wright to describe a certain mixture of place, past, and faith. To See A Promised Land draws upon a wide variety of written accounts--those of American travelers (from Twain to Theodore Roosevelt), missionaries, settlers and colonists, explorers, archaeologists, biblical scholars, and diplomats and officials--in order to shed light on this fascinating aspect of American thought and character.

This book examines the careers of 53 area experts in the US State Department’s Middle East bureau during the Cold War. Known as Arabists or Middle East hands, they were very different in background, education, and policy outlook from their predecessors, the Orientalists. A highly competitive selection process and rigorous training shaped them into a small corps of diplomatic professionals with top-notch linguistic and political reporting skills. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. This study focuses on their transformative role in Middle East diplomacy from the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations.

Civil war, the completion of transcontinental railroads, rapid urbanization and industrialization, the rise of managerial capitalism, and new entanglements abroad rent the fabric of life in nineteenth-century America. Through all the turmoil, the American Bible Society thrived. This engaging book tells how a modest antebellum reform agency responded to cataclysmic social change and grew to be a nonprofit corporate bureaucracy that managed, among other projects, what was one of the largest publishing houses in the United States.