The Burning Tigris; The Armenian Genocide and America's Response
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. x, 475, [1] pages. Illus., map, notes, glossary, selected bibliography, index. Signed by the author. Peter Balakian (born June 13, 1951) is an Armenian American poet, writer and academic, the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of Humanities at Colgate University. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2016. Balakian’s memoir Black Dog of Fate (1997) was winner of the PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir and a New York Times Notable Book. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (2003) received the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book and New York Times and national best seller. According to the Pulitzer board, Balakian’s work “bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.” He is also a recipient of the Khorenatsi medal. 2016 he was awarded Armenia’s 2015 Presidential Award for significant contribution to the process of the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. The highly acclaimed author of "Black Dog of Fate" offers a landmark history of the Armenian massacres of the 1890's and the genocide of 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, and America's extraordinary response. The Turkish government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. In the United States, many people came together to try to save the Armenians. Courageous missionaries, diplomats, and relief workers recorded their eyewitness accounts and often risked their lives in the killing fields of Armenia.
The Armenian Genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust, was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, mostly Ottoman citizens who formed a religious minority within the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders from Constantinople to Ankara, the majority of whom were eventually murdered. The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labor, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly, and the infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre. Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians and the Ottoman Greeks were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government in the Assyrian genocide and the Greek genocide, and their treatment is considered by some historians to be part of the same genocidal policy. Most Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide.
Raphael Lemkin was explicitly moved by the Armenian annihilation to define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters and to coin the word genocide in 1943. The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, because scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out in order to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.
Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide as an accurate term for the mass killings of Armenians that began under Ottoman rule in 1915. It has in recent years been faced with repeated calls to recognize them as genocide. To date, 29 countries have officially recognized the mass killings as genocide, as have most genocide scholars and historians. Condition: Very good / very good.
Keywords: Abdul Hamid, Censorship, Signed, Deportations, Henry Morgenthau, Ottoman Empire, American Red Cross, Turkey, Armenian Genocide, Clara Barton, War Crimes, Human Rights, Ataturk, Theodore Roosevelt, Talaat, Woodrow Wilson
ISBN: 0060198400
[Book #72517]
Price: $50.00