ANCA-WR Education Committee

Armenian Genocide

Overview

The Armenian Genocide (1915-1923) was the Ottoman government’s systematic extermination of its peaceful Christian Armenian subjects from their historic homeland within the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. As a result of the state-ordered and implemented campaign of genocide, the Ottoman Empire killed 1,500,000 Armenian men, women, and children, exiled the Armenian nation from its historic homeland, and destroyed and deported hundreds of thousands of its other Christian citizens.

 

The following books may be found at Armenian Bookstores and on Amazon and primarily focus on the Armenian Genocide and its implications. Descriptions were taken from Amazon and other similar sources

Guides

The Armenian Genocide: 1915-1923: A Handbook for Students and Teachers

Simon Payaslian

This handbook, prepared by the tireless efforts of Dr.  Simon Payaslian of UCLA, provides both a historical perspective of  the Genocide and an overview of international and national  constraints in preventing the genocides that followed, highlighting  the world’s inability to deal appropriately with the perpetrators of  the Armenian tragedy. This book also provides teachers with maps,  graphs and eyewitness accounts as well as valuable teaching aids  such as worksheets, discussion and essay topics to maximize the  student’s understanding of how the unspeakable can occur and  recur even in contemporary times.

A Lesson Plan based on The Armenian Genocide – News Accounts from the American Press, 1915-1922

Richard Kloian

This newly edited edition of 460 pages comprises  more than 200 articles from The New York Times with bonus  material from 1890-1909 reporting the massacres of Armenians in  earlier periods, thus establishing the antecedents to the 1915  genocide. Also included are two analytical essays along with sixty  full length articles from American periodicals of the time, including  Ambassador Morgenthau’s story as it was first made public and many  other important documents.

Books

A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility

Taner Akcam

Edited by the leading historian of the Republic of Armenia, this is the definitive history of an extraordinary country – from its earliest foundations, through the Crusades, the resistance to Ottoman and Tsarist rule, the collapse of the independent state, its brief re-emergence after World War I, its subjugation by the Bolsheviks, and the establishment of the new Republic in 1991. Written by the foremost experts on each period in Armenia’s history, this book is a major contribution to understanding the complexities of Transcaucasia. Armenia is a cradle of civilization situated on one of the world’s most turbulent crossroads. This volume examines the question of Armenian origins and traces domestic and international relations, society and culture through the five dynastic periods, spanning nearly two thousand years. The challenge facing the Armenian people was to maintain as much freedom as possible under the shadow of powerful neighbouring empires. The adoption of Christianity had a permanent impact on the course of Armenian history and culture. These were the heroic, colourful and harsh feudal centuries of Armenia.

“They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else:” A History of the Armenian Genocide

Ronald Grigor Suny

Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War, the number of Armenians in what would become Turkey had been reduced by 90 percent―more than a million people. A century later, the Armenian Genocide remains controversial but relatively unknown, overshadowed by later slaughters and the chasm separating Turkish and Armenian interpretations of events. In this definitive narrative history, Ronald Suny cuts through nationalist myths, propaganda, and denial to provide an unmatched account of when, how, and why the atrocities of 1915–16 were committed. Drawing on archival documents and eyewitness accounts, this is an unforgettable chronicle of a cataclysm that set a tragic pattern for a century of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide

Richard G. Hovannisian and others

The Armenian Genocide that began in World War I, during the drive to transform the plural Ottoman Empire into a monoethnic Turkey, removed a people from its homeland and erased most evidence of their 3000-yearold material and spiritual culture. For the rest of this century, changing world events, calculated silence, and active suppression of memory have overshadowed the initial global outrage and have threatened to make this calamity “the forgotten genocide” of world history. Fourteen leading scholars here examine the Armenian Genocide from a variety of perspectives to refute those efforts and show how remembrance and denial have shaped perceptions of the event. Many of the chapters draw on archival records and court proceedings to review the precursors and process of the genocide, examine German complicity, and share the responses of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders.

Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide

Lorna Touryan Miller & Donald Eugene

Between 1915 and 1923, over one million Armenians died, victims of a genocidal campaign that is still denied by the Turkish government. Thousands of other Armenians suffered torture, brutality, deportation. Yet their story has received scant attention. Through interviews with a hundred elderly Armenians, Donald and Lorna Miller give the “forgotten genocide” the hearing it deserves. Survivors raise important issues about genocide and about how people cope with traumatic experience. Much here is wrenchingly painful, yet it also speaks to the strength of the human spirit.

The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response

Peter Balakian

In this national bestseller, the critically acclaimed author Peter Balakian brings us a riveting narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Turkish government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling, he resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history.

Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey

Lerna Ekmekcioglu

Recovering Armenia offers the first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Armenians who remained in Turkey. Following World War I, as the victorious Allied powers occupied Ottoman territories, Armenian survivors returned to their hometowns optimistic that they might establish an independent Armenia. But Turkish resistance prevailed, and by 1923 the Allies withdrew, the Turkish Republic was established, and Armenians were left again to reconstruct their communities within a country that still considered them traitors. Lerna Ekmekcioglu investigates how Armenians recovered their identity within these drastically changing political conditions. Reading Armenian texts and images produced in Istanbul from the close of WWI through the early 1930s, Ekmekcioglu gives voice to the community’s most prominent public figures, notably Hayganush Mark, a renowned activist, feminist, and editor of the influential journal Hay Gin

The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire

Taner Akcam

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. Presenting these previously inaccessible documents along with expert context and analysis, Taner Akçam’s most authoritative work to date goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey’s “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that Akçam now uses to overturn the official narrative.

THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: THE ESSENTIAL REFERENCE GUIDE​

Alan Whitehorn

With its analytical introductory essays, more than 140 individual entries, a historical timeline, and primary documents, this book provides an essential reference volume on the Armenian Genocide.

The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide

Taner Akcam and Umit Kur

This book examines the confiscation of Armenian properties during the genocide and subsequent attempts to retain seized Armenian wealth. Through the close analysis of laws and treaties, it reveals that decrees issued during the genocide constitute central pillars of the Turkish system of property rights, retaining their legal validity, and although Turkey has acceded through international agreements to return Armenian properties, it continues to refuse to do so. The book demonstrates that genocides do not depend on the abolition of the legal system and elimination of rights, but that, on the contrary, the perpetrators of genocide manipulate the legal system to facilitate their plans.

Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century Long Struggle for Justice

Michael Bobelian

The first book to chronicle the aftermath of the twentieth century’s first genocide, this groundbreaking work recounts the Armenians’ struggle for justice in the face of fifty years of silence and denial. First comprehensive account: From 1915 to 1923, the Ottoman Turks drove two million Armenians from their ancestral homeland, slaughtering 1.5 million of them in the process.