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.

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.