Disputing the History of Ottoman Violence: An American Missionary and an Original Counternarrative of the Bulgarian Atrocities of 1876

Commonly regarded as popularizing anti-Turkish reports of the Bulgarian Atrocities, the almost totally neglected report of the violence by the American missionaries themselves challenges these erroneous assumptions. On a number of fronts considered herein, the report by the American missionaries is an original counternarrative of these contentious events and nothing less than a corrective––albeit from a surprising source––to the persistent anti-Ottoman bias of the Western historiographic tradition over the last 150 years. The counternarrative invites the careful reconsideration of the events, the Western historiographic tradition, and Bulgarian and Turkish nationalist traditions.

Brandon Johnson is a PhD candidate in Middle Eastern Studies at Groningen University, researching and writing about the influence of American missionaries on U.S. foreign policy in the late Ottoman Empire.