Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Foreword -- Overview of the Armenian Genocide -- Bibliography -- Notes On Using the Documents -- The Documents -- Glossary -- Index

Indexed in the Guide with the same title which is available in the library (DS 195.5 A743 l991 Guide. WEB Govt Pub).

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.

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is Balakian’s devastating eyewitness account—a haunting reminder of the first modern genocide and a controversial historical document that is destined to become a classic of survivor literature.

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.

New areas of research are not the result of a snap of the finger. They are carved out of the marrow of human existence. The study of genocide well illustrates this raw fact. From the early efforts that emerged in the struggle against Nazism, and over the past half century, the field has now reached a point where there at least five genocide centers across the globe, and well over one hundred Holocaust centers. This work emerged out of an earlier effort at an oral history project; one that would enable a new generation of scholars, researchers and policy makers to assess the major foci of the field, efforts to develop ways and means to intervene and prevent future genocides, and review the successes and failures of the field. The editors of Pioneers of Genocide Studies emphasize that contributors should approach the questions of greatest relevance in a personal way, crafting a statement that reveals ones individual voice, persuasions, literary style, scholarly perspectives, and relevant details of ones life. The book succeeds admirably in the above aims, and, in so doing, epitomizes scholarly autobiographical writing at its best. The book also includes the most important works by each author on the issue of genocide. As a result, the collective portrait enhances the usefulness of the volume for those new to the field. Among the contributors are experts in the Armenian Bosnian, Cambodian genocides, as well as the Holocaust against the Jewish people. The contributors are Rouben Adalian, M. Cherif Bassiouni, Israel W. Charney, Vahakn Dadrian, Helen Fein, Barbara Harff, David Hawk, Herbert Hirsch, Irving Louis Horowitz, Richard Hovannisian, Henry Huttenbach, Leo Kuper, Raphael Lemkin, James E. Mace, Eric Markusen, Robert Melson, R.J. Rummel, Roger W. Smith, Gregory H. Stanton, Ervin Staub, Colin Tatz, Yves Ternan, and the co-editors. The work has been five years in the making and represents a high watermark in the reflections and self-reflections on the comparative study of genocide. Samuel Totten is professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the editor of First Person Accounts of Genocidal Acts and Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views, and book review editor for the Journal of Genocide Research. Steven Leonard Jacobs is associate professor and Aaron Aronov Chair of Judaic Studies in the department of religious studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He is the author of Shirot Bialik: A New and Annotated Translation of Chaim Nachman Bialiks Epic Poems, Raphael Lemkins Thoughts on Nazi Genocide: Not Guilty? and Contemporary Christian and Contemporary Jewish Religious Responses to the Shoah.