From 1915 to 1923, the Ottoman Empire drove the Armenians from their ancestral homeland and slaughtered 1.5 million of them in the process. While there was an initial global outcry and a movement led by Woodrow Wilson to aid the “starving Armenians,” the promises to hold the perpetrators accountable were never fulfilled. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Bobelian profiles the leading players—Armenian activists and assassins, Turkish diplomats, U.S. officials— each of whom played a significant role in furthering or opposing the century-long Armenian quest for justice in the face of Turkish denial of its crimes, and reveals the events that have conspired to eradicate the “forgotten Genocide” from the world’s memory.

From Thaddeus and Bartholomew through present day, this charming and informative book takes young readers on the inspirational, colorful, and challenging journey of the Armenian people.

Between 1915 and 1925 as many as 1.5 million Armenians, a minority in the Ottoman Empire, died in Ottoman Turkey, victims of execution, starvation, and death marches to the Syrian Desert. Peterson explores the American response to these atrocities, from initial reports to President Wilson until Armenia's eventual absorption into the Soviet Union.

“This searing account of a little boy wrenched from family and innocence” during the Armenian genocide “is a literary gem” (Financial Times). When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly a thousand Armenian and four hundred Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care. This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years—as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage. The Antoura orphanage was another project of the Armenian genocide: Its administrators, some benign and some cruel, sought to transform the children into Turks by changing their Armenian names, forcing them to speak Turkish, and erasing their history. Panian’s memoir is a full-throated story of loss, resistance, and survival, but told without bitterness or sentimentality. His story shows us how even young children recognize injustice and can organize against it, how they can form a sense of identity that they will fight to maintain. He paints a painfully rich and detailed picture of the lives and agency of Armenian orphans during the darkest days of World War I. Ultimately, Karnig Panian survived the Armenian genocide and the deprivations that followed. Goodbye, Antoura assures us of how humanity, once denied, can be again reclaimed.