Domestic Frontiers
Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East
Publication Year: 2013
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press

Introduction: The Home as the Focus of Women’s Civilizing Mission
In October 1876, officers of the Boston-based Woman’s Board of Missions of the Congregational Church celebrated the completion of the Constantinople Home, their ambitious new center for women missionaries in Istanbul.1 The officers deemed the city an important location for their work; it...

1. Missionary Families and the Contested Concept of Home
Once she had settled into her new home in Izmir toward the end of
1843, Mary Van Lennep wrote to her mother in Hartford, Connecticut,
to describe her new environment in the major Ottoman sea port south
of Istanbul:
Our house is quite a warm one for this place, and the little parlor
in which I am writing is heated by a cheerful grate. The two...

2. Education, Conversion, and Bulgarian Orthodox Nationalism
On a late September day in 1867, a crowd of Bulgarian Orthodox Christians attacked the mission house of Charles Morse, a missionary with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in the town of Stara Zagora. Rumors had spread among the Bulgarian community that...

3. The Mission Press and Bulgarian Domestic Reform
In his annual report for 1869, missionary Albert Long commented on a new development in Bulgarian society: Bulgarian Orthodox women had begun to campaign publicly for improved access to education for their daughters. Across the Ottoman Balkans, they organized associations to raise funds...

4. Unconventional Couples—Gender, Race, and Power in Mission Politics
During the early summer of 1876, tensions that had been festering for four years at the Samokov station of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions erupted into a major conflict that pitted two single American women missionaries and an Anglo-Bulgarian couple against...

5. The Constantinople Home
When the officers of the Woman’s Board of Missions designed the Constantinople Home in the early 1870s, they planned an ambitious institution for the center of women’s missionary operations in Istanbul. Envisaging a school for girls as the focal point of the building, they also...

Conclusion
In an era of massive political disruption, Protestantism and Ottomanism alike extended to Bulgarian Orthodox Christians the option of a supranational identity that transcended traditional markers of distinctiveness. American missionaries worked to bring Bulgarians into a global community of...
E-ISBN-13: 9781613762233
E-ISBN-10: 1613762232
Print-ISBN-13: 9781558499812
Print-ISBN-10: 1558499814
Page Count: 232
Illustrations: 12 illus.
Publication Year: 2013
OCLC Number: 859687009
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Domestic Frontiers