This compelling book chronicles a remarkable American educational undertaking that spanned two continents and survived three wars. William McGrew recounts the challenges faced by Anatolia College’s leaders and the solutions they found to achieve their goals within the often-turbulent social, religious, and political environments of their host countries. McGrew begins with Anatolia’s nineteenth-century Boston-based founders, who initially hoped to bring Calvinist Christianity to the diverse peoples of the Ottoman Empire and gradually shifted their emphasis to educational goals. While seeking to enrich the lives of the inhabitants of Asia Minor and beyond from the College’s campus south of the Black Sea, Protestant educators also encountered rampant ethnic strife and the loss of many students and staff. Most memorable was the pursuit on horseback across Turkey’s plains by two American women to save some fifty girls otherwise destined to perish at the hands of Turks. Renewed violence following World War I forced Anatolia to relocate from Turkey to Thessaloniki, the major city of northern Greece. The book follows Anatolia over the subsequent decades as it embraced a society experiencing an often-violent trajectory, including the Nazi occupation followed by civil war. Nonetheless, the College succeeded in developing a spacious campus and in drawing able students from all parts of Greece through generous scholarships. Close collaboration between Greek and American educators in merging the Hellenic cultural legacy with the strongest features of American instruction enabled Anatolia to become today one of Greece’s most outstanding institutions at both the school and college levels. Its rich history provides a unique window on the American missionary movement, the Armenian genocides, the Greek-Turkish conflict, two world wars and ongoing achievements in international education through the prism of the survival and growth of an American college caught in near-perpetual upheaval.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.

Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.

A compilation of previously published works, including The morning cometh (New Rochelle, NY : Aristide D. Caratzas, 1986) and Letters of Carl C. Compton to his wife Ruth, while working as Director of UNRAA operations in Thessaloniki, Greece (August 1944-September 1945) (Thessaloniki : [s.n], 2002).

The forgotten story of Central Asia's enlightenment—its rise, fall, and enduring legacy In this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown story of Central Asia's medieval enlightenment through the eventful lives and astonishing accomplishments of its greatest minds—remarkable figures who built a bridge to the modern world. Because nearly all of these figures wrote in Arabic, they were long assumed to have been Arabs. In fact, they were from Central Asia—drawn from the Persianate and Turkic peoples of a region that today extends from Kazakhstan southward through Afghanistan, and from the easternmost province of Iran through Xinjiang, China. Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects. They gave algebra its name, calculated the earth's diameter with unprecedented precision, wrote the books that later defined European medicine, and penned some of the world's greatest poetry. One scholar, working in Afghanistan, even predicted the existence of North and South America—five centuries before Columbus. Rarely in history has a more impressive group of polymaths appeared at one place and time. No wonder that their writings influenced European culture from the time of St. Thomas Aquinas down to the scientific revolution, and had a similarly deep impact in India and much of Asia. Lost Enlightenment chronicles this forgotten age of achievement, seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories about the cause of its eventual demise. Informed by the latest scholarship yet written in a lively and accessible style, this is a book that will surprise general readers and specialists alike.