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Barbara Reeves-Ellington , Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East (Amherst, Mass., and Boston : University of Massachusetts Press , 2013). Pp. 232. $80.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Gender and Social History
In 1878, Nathaniel G. Clark, foreign secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, hailed the establishment two years earlier of the Constantinople Home in Istanbul--"the very center of Mohammedan power"--as a powerful symbol of American Protestant women's dedication to their less fortunate sisters in the Ottoman Empire (p. 1). Founded and funded by the Woman's Board of Missions of the Congregational Church in Boston, the Home began life as a "modest mission school" whose pupils were mostly the daughters of Orthodox converts to Protestantism. How it evolved into the American College for Girls, "a preeminent institution of higher education that celebrated its identity as an American liberal arts college rather than its Protestant evangelical origins" (p. 141) and enrolled international students of many faiths, is one of the revealing stories told by Barbara Reeves-Ellington in her engaging new monograph.
The book joins a growing number of studies that examine the expansion of American influence abroad through the lens of Protestant missionary history. Focusing primarily on the interactions among American Board missionaries and Bulgarian Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Balkans and western Anatolia between 1831 and 1908, the year that the Woman's Board ceded control of the American Girls College to an independent board of trustees in New York City, Reeves-Ellington employs a transnational approach that strives to balance the preponderance of missionary sources with close attention to harder-to-glean local perspectives. These she mines from a "multilingual source base" (in Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, French, and English) that includes government and diplomatic documents, municipal reports, press accounts, memoirs, and personal correspondence (p....