Publication date:
16 April 2015Length of book:
588 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442243460
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.
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.
A scholarly, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched history of a resilient institution that has gone a long way since its original theoretical inception in the Haystack Prayer Meeting at Williams College in 1806. . . . A historian by training, McGrew provides a synthetic account of the school’s changing identity alongside major political and social events. At the same time, the author was a key figure in the school’s administration from 1974 until 1999, which enables him to offer insights on the policies, challenges, and initiatives of the school as a social and educational institution. It is through this unique combination of a historian and administrator that he can present an informed, balanced, and intriguing narrative that does not escape either to abstract generalizations or narrow specificities. . . . This is a book of utmost value first and foremost to the large community of Anatolians but also to scholars interested in the transnational educational and cultural exchanges in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece. . . . Educating across Cultures also offers a rich array of sources, information, and details that will contribute to alternative histories of the American and missionary schools in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and Greece.