Ottoman History Podcast - A Confederate General in the Ottoman Capital

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

with Elizabeth Varon hosted by Chris Gratien | After the US Civil War, many leaders of the defeated Confederacy followed unusual trajectories, perhaps none more so than James Longstreet, who joined the Republican party to become a proponent of Southern Reconstruction and for a brief period, the Minister Resident to the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, we talk to Elizabeth Varon, author of a new biography of Longstreet, about the rebel-turned-diplomat's brief tenure in the Ottoman capital during the early years of Sultan Abdul Hamid II's reign, and we discuss what Longstreet's experiences reveal about America on the world stage in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction. We also discuss Prof. Varon's personal connection to post-Ottoman Istanbul, as well as her new research about Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who followed in Longstreet's footsteps some years later on a humanitarian mission to the Ottoman Armenains in Anatolia.    « Click for More »

Welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. In this episode, we have a rather special guest for us. I'm joined by my colleague at the University of Virginia, Elizabeth Varen. Professor Varen, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Chris. It's just a delight to be here. I'm a huge admirer of the podcast.

Well, we are a huge admirer of your work. and this is a conversation long in the making. Elizabeth Varen is a professor of history at University of Virginia for a long time now, has published a lot in the field of U.S. history on the Civil War and the years that followed. But in this episode, we're going to be learning about a little side story in one of Professor Varen's recent books, the story of a Confederate general in the Ottoman Empire, in the Ottoman Capital specifically. And some of our listeners may be aware that there were many Confederate exiles in the years after the U.S. Civil War. What makes this Confederate General different is that he was the Reform General, Longstreet, one of the leading generals in the Confederacy who went on to

become a pro-union Republican functionary, and he travels to the Ottoman Empire in 1880 to serve as resident minister, so effectively the ambassador of the United States. It's a fascinating story. It's completely unlikely. It's somewhat easy to overlook. I'll give a little bit of background on Longstreet himself. So he was a very important Confederate general second only to Robert E. Lee in the Confederate hierarchy, a successful general for much of the war. After the war, he has a political about-face that is as unusual as any about-face in American history, hard to think of a sort of more striking one. He throws in his lot with Lincoln's Republican Party, the party of emancipation, of black freedom, of union, victory,

of reconstruction, thereby defying the tendencies of the rest of white Southern society, political allegiances thereof. And he decides to support Congress's plan to reconstruct the defeated southern states. The centerpiece of that plan was black voting, the enfranchisement of African American men in the South and the creation of interracial governing coalitions led by Lincoln's Republican Party to remake modernize the defeated southern states. This is an unusual stance. My biography of him explains why he takes it. It's a combination of factors that include a deep friendship with U.S. Grant, who's the great hero of the Union War, magnanimous peace terms to the defeated South had been intended to win over Southerners and prompt their atonement, their repentance,

their compliance with the new order. Longstreet sees those terms through the lens of this friendship and decides to turn the page and embrace reconstruction. He, as a result of supporting black voting and these new interracial governing coalitions in the defeated South, he becomes a pariah among former Confederates. But he also launches a career as a Republican operative, as you put it, as a supporter of Lincoln's Republican Party and as a representative of the hope and prospect that white Southerners, including some of the most elite and prominent ones, might be won over to this new order. So he's a representative of that hope.

So in part because he takes this brave stand defending reconstruction, including defending the New Orleans reconstruction government from white supremacist mobs in 1874. So he really sort of puts his money where his mouth is, literally leading black troops against former Confederates in a coup attempt. He is rewarded by Republican presidents with patronage posts, some small scale. But this one, the author, to be minister to Turkey is a major coup for Longstreet. And so he's sent to the Ottoman Empire to represent the United States and the interests of the Republican Party. He doesn't much know what to expect. His tenure there will be relatively short. He'll be recalled because he has sort of important missions back home, which the party will call him to. But I make the argument in my book,

an article on this topic that though short, this stint in the Ottoman Empire is quite revealing and really speaks to some big themes in American history and in Ottoman history in this period. So in a micro-history way, this small story of a brief window is quite revealing. You know, as you said, Longstreet's part of this program to win back the South. Yeah. And what ends up happening at the end of the Reconstruction era is the South sort of or at least the Southern Elite sort of start to win some of the terms of the post-war agreement. Absolutely.

And so Longstreet's leaving in this moment where reconstruction is in crisis, and he's arriving in an Ottoman Empire that has just been through its own process of radical reform, a constitutional revolution, and then the abrupt abrogation of its new constitution by the new Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Yes. So both of these empires, if we may say, are in, in flux in this moment. Absolutely. Yes. And he is arriving as resident minister in a very bare bones diplomatic core of the United States, which is not one of these great powers of the era. Yeah. Britain and France. Right. And he's not a diplomat previously. Right. Exactly. Right. He hits the

ground running. He hits the ground running. It's not that, you know, as one thinks about that set up, you know, you wonder what could possibly be significant about these few months that he spends. But it's sort of rife with symbolism. We can sort of see this from the start. So a couple things, as you said, it's not an important diplomatic post in terms of U.S. foreign policy priorities. The U.S. is simply not a player in the Eastern question. Americans follow it. But, you know, the balance of power, or, you know, England, Russia, France, the Balkans, the debt crisis, default, whatever. The U.S. is not, doesn't have a seat at the table as the great powers are debating these things. That's not why it's important. It's important in part because of the U.S.'s missionary presence, and we'll come back

to that, which is huge in this region. It's symbolically important in the context of U.S. politics, and to a degree the Western powers take note of this, because it is a symbol of the return of white Southerners to positions of power and trust and authority. As you can imagine, you know, Longstreet arrives in Constantinople. He receives his credential from the Sultan in December of 1880 at Yildiz Palace. And the press, including the French and British press, cover this in a somewhat, as does the American press, in a sort of incredulous way, how is it that a man who, 14 years earlier, waged war against this government, a war that results in the deaths of 750,000 people, is now invested by that government with the power to serve as a minister abroad. People sort of scratch their heads. Now, in terms of his actual duties while he's in Constantinople, Longstreet proves pretty politically savvy handling some minor crises that come up on his watch. He sends aid to the island of Kios when it's devastated by an earthquake. He works with Turkish diplomats to negotiate a firmen permission for American archaeologists to work on the, in Assos, an important,

archaeological site. The Turkish authorities were suspicious that archaeologists were potentially up to no good that they were, you know, potentially political agents and so on. So it took some, it took some finesse. He was also asked to get a firm and for some excavation on Crete and that he wasn't able to swing. That was just too big an ask. But he has these these successes. He intervenes on behalf of a few American citizens who want assurances that they have some extraterritorial immunity and rights that they're trying to assert. And, you know, the status of Americans in these, you know, in these Ottoman lands is a little bit tenuous, technically protected by treaty provisions, but there's a lot of tension. A few incidents where

an American is accused of killing an Ottoman subject and, you know, will that criminal come to justice? Lots of tension about that. Or Americans are killed by Ottoman subjects. Will the, will the, you know, criminals come to justice? A lot of diplomatic tensions about sort of flare-ups of violence. So this is all, you know, background for Long Streets work. Ultimately, what he is asked to do as his primary diplomatic role is not what he wants to be doing, but what the, what the setting calls for. What he wants to be doing is promoting trade. He's a representative of the Republican Party, the party of economic modernization in America. And he takes one look at Istanbul, Constantinople, and he says, wow, you know, this place could just be, you know, an economic, you know, dream, particularly

if some, you know, developments like railway access could be promoted. But he doesn't get a chance to think work on that much. America doesn't really have a policy that he's being asked to implement. What he ends up doing is wrangling missionaries, trying to take care of the missionaries. Those pesky missionaries, right? Those pesky missionaries. There's been a whole generation of American diplomats by this point who have been dealing with the affairs of American Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, who are very active, like the largest missionary organization at this point. You're writing about how Longstreet's arriving in the moment of a sort of shift. Yeah. And, in their position in the Ottoman Empire.

Yeah, exactly. So missionaries had had a broad presence there for a long time. The Ottoman Empire comprises the Holy Lands. You know, as they see it, this is a major target for them, generally working among non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, as you and others have written about, trying to convert Armenians to Protestantism and so on. But the missionaries long streets take is that provided that they stay pretty close to Constantinople,

they're not too much trouble, but when they go off into the hinterlands, then invariably they overstay their welcome, overreach, and so on. And he has to deal with this directly in one incident in the spring of 1881. He hears from a missionary who had been an agent of the American Bible house in Gallipoli that this missionary's Bibles had been taken from him by provincial authorities, hundreds of Bibles. And the missionary wants indemnification for the loss of those Bibles. And the missionary wants indemnification for the loss of those Bibles. And Longstreet approaches the Turkish foreign minister, Assim Pasha, and they exchanged some testy letters. And Long Street gets on his high horse and says, we have this long relationship. We have these treaties of commerce and amity. You know,

our missionaries have been there forever. There are, you know, no political threat to you. Please indemnify us. And Asim Pasha really brushes him off and says we have every right to be suspicious of missionaries and also to defer to our provincial, you know, officials and let them make judgment calls in cases like this. So Longstreet gets nowhere and it just presses him with what he feels is the kind of futility of trying to be the interlocutor, of trying to protect missionaries and also trying to control them. So the way I read this, reading some of the historiography, is that it's a small but nonetheless revealing window into a big policy shift from a broader policy of tolerance that we associate with the Tanzamot reforms to a policy of containment,

more surveillance, more suspicion, blacklisting, harassment, and so on of missionaries. Obviously, so connected to the Armenian question and perceived sympathy of missionaries for Armenians and so on. I don't get much in that in this article, although I'm starting to think about that for another project. In some ways, Longstreet's failure to get indemnified is symptomatic of his broader ways in which his diplomatic mission is limited in its success by the condition of the American diplomatic corps, which you alluded to briefly. You know, he finds himself in Constantinople. Again, the Americans don't really have a seat at the table in the big, great powers debates. He also is underfunded.

It's diplomacy on a shoestring at this point. He's not receiving any clear instructions from Washington, nor is he receiving any funds from them. So while the other European ministers are throwing lavish parties at their houses in which all kinds of important conversations are happening. Longstreet can't reciprocate. And he realizes he's sort of on the outs. To me, what was interesting was that the newspapers, including the British press, French press, covered his sort of investiture with his credentials when he first arrives, but they don't say a word about him after that because he's really not important from their perspective. But it's nonetheless revealing because it's in some sense a story of the American Republican parties, again, think party of Lincoln, party of emancipation, party of union victory. of Reconstruction, its efforts to project its power in this era. It's trying to project its power in the American South, as you suggested, by the time Long

Street heads over to Istanbul, that reconstruction effort is really on the wane, all but crumbled. It's also trying to project its power in the West, the Western United States, the dispossession of Native Americans, extractive capitalism, breaking of unions, etc. And it's beginning to try to project its power abroad. And there are real limits to its ability to do those things in any of these places, in part because of the difficulty of coalition building. And so it's in some ways a reflection on the limits of a Republican power at this time. Right. And it's not the end of Longstreet story, which people can read the book to find out about it.

But it is an interesting kind of place to end that story. that starts at the Civil War. Right. One of the biggest things that was happening in the world at the time, this huge moment in American history, and then for an American to go abroad

to the capital of by no means the most powerful empire in the European state system, the Ottoman Empire, and to feel like the smallness of America on the world stage is a very interesting contrast. We mentioned that,

you know, after the war, some ex-Confederates, you know, went to places where slavery was still legal, like Brazil and Egypt in hopes of like kind of you know keeping the party going so to speak and the Ottoman Empire is actually one of these places where the slave trade has been banned or limited in various ways but slavery is still very much legal yeah does Longstreet comment on this at all yeah I was I would have I would have I would have you know love to hear him talk about it as it were

in the in the records I had access to And I didn't have personal papers of his. It's mostly diplomatic correspondence. He has a fire in his house that comes later in his life, destroys some personal paper. So there's some, we're somewhat limited by that. But I didn't see him talking about slavery. I think he was, he was, you know, I gleaned that he was in favor of the host of modernizing reforms that the Tanzimot, you know, comprised. And that in some ways, as he's negotiating with Asim Pashabash, offer this to be indemnified. And so he's asking that those reforms be respected, the spirit of those reforms be respected in terms of, again, tolerance for missionaries. But his own journey with regard to slavery was an interesting one. He was a, he was a, you know, a Confederate general who subscribed completely to Confederate pro-slavery orthodoxies and who drifts away from that, belief system for again a whole lot of complicated reasons after the war comes to regard the demise of slavery in America as providential you know something that God has had willed something that was for

the best something that was for the best for the white South our American Civil War in a sense the the ideology the conceit if you will the fantasy of the those in the union who waged it was that they would break the spell slaveholds had cast over Southern society, disenthrall this white Southern masses from that pro-slavery spell, and open the door literally and figuratively to the flow of ideas, wealth, investment, technology, modernization, and so on, and that the economic modernization of the South would benefit all white Southerners. And Longstreet, in a way, northerners celebrated, you know, came himself to embrace that view of the war. Unfortunately, and this gets back to the point

about the difficulty of coalition building for the Republicans, he was exceedingly rare. You know, the hope was that, again, white Southerners could be delivered. They could be saved from themselves, essentially. That was the Northern hope in the Civil War. And Northerners clung to this hope despite massive evidence that white Southerners did not want to be saved from themselves. Long Street embraces this entire worldview. but he is a pariah ostracized in the South for it because it's just so, you know, so damn unusual and considered utterly unacceptable. No, it's fascinating and it's fascinating to see, you know, in a moment where countries like

Great Britain are actively trying to get the Ottoman Empire to enforce bans on slave trade and to push them towards abolition and there's international conferences on this topic. Like here you have an American representative of the party of Lincoln who just fought in a war over slavery in Constantinople attempting to project America's power. Yeah. And slavery really isn't part of the conversation. Yeah, it doesn't seem to be again. It kind of tells you what's happening in the U.S. at that time. It tells you what's happening in the U.S. at that time.

You know, Longstreet is, stint is short because he's, you know, he's called back to serve as U.S. Marshal in Georgia, the Republican Party, you know, that his home mission to sort of persuade white Southerners to embrace Republican priorities is more important than the foreign mission. He's you know and any and he goes back and has some you know mixed success trying to do that one of the things he does is US martialists fight the clan so he hasn't he hasn't retreated entirely from the position of defending the idea of some sort of interracial government but it is important to note and this is this is a bit of an side, but it's just in a sense a window into the main theme of my book about him. He was,

he was no true racial egalitarian the way Charles Sumner or someone like that was. You know, Longstreet believed that African Americans should have a role as junior partners, as constituents, maybe a few leaders, but mostly as constituents in a white southern governing structure that was dominated by whites like himself. But even that limited challenge to the racial caste system was enough to make him a pariah among the white, unconstructed white southerners who wanted blacks to have no role whatsoever. And so the issue of race relations is still very much on his mind at this time. But I think much of Turkish politics would have been largely illegible to him. Right.

He also had a, you know, he didn't have any language proficiency. He was, again, he didn't, he didn't have a lot of access to the social scene. I think he was, he was pretty confounded by a lot of it. So the small successes are kind of all the more surprising in that light. I want to transition by asking you about really your personal connection to the place where Long Street's mission takes place. It's a small story in your larger book about him. But it's an interesting connection that your father actually immigrated to the United States from Istanbul.

Yeah. Can you tell us about him? Yeah, I'm glad to. I mean, part of what drew me to Longstreet as somebody to write about was knowing that he had this Turkish history chapter and that no one had written a word about it. One thing I wanted to mention earlier was that when Longstreet became a pariah among ex-Confederates, he was also retroactively blamed by them for losing the civil war. allegedly his poor performance at Gettysburg and some other battles, which they attributed not only to sort of having an off day, but to kind of treachery. His heart was never in the cause sort of thing.

You know, he became the scapegoat for Confederate defeat. And literally, it's almost, I can almost not describe it or not conjure how much has been written about his military performance in the Civil War. Should he be scapegoated for the loss of Gettysburg, etc? That's what people had thought about and written about. So, you know, I'm drawn to it by this four months in Istanbul. Well, you know, the reason is in part, again, my own background. My father was Turkish.

He came to this country as a young man in 1960. His own parents were from Chinakale, and the Dardanelles Port Town, Sephardic Jews, big Sephardic Jewish community there. His parents came to Istanbul during World War I. and settled in the Gallata region, neighborhood of Istanbul. My father went to Jewish high school and then on to Robert College. Founded by American Missionaries. Founded by an American missionary.

And indeed, you know, one of the sort of original missionaries who was one of the founders of Robert College was a gentleman off of now I won't be able to remember his name, who had come up with the whole plan for building a universe. in Tennessee that would win over the diluted white southern masses to the Republican cause. So, you know, he realizes that's impractical and then decides to build a college in Istanbul instead. So there's sort of all kinds of strange connections here. But in any case, yeah, it didn't mean that I came to this with any deep knowledge of Ottoman history. I didn't, alas, but I had been to Turkey many times to visit family.

I'd been to the places, you know, obvious to all the places you would imagine at Topkapah Palace and the great mom. and to Gallata Tower and to Doma Bacha, Ruma Hussar, all these places that were, you know, landmarks I could picture. As I was reading about all of this stuff, I had a sense of the opulence of the Ottoman court and some idea of what impression that might have made on Longstreet. So all of that just drew me to the project and is indeed drawing me now to another sort of Turkish topic, and that is Clara Barton's work, Armenian relief work in mid-1890s in Turkey. Yeah. Yeah. And your father's name was Benzion, Varon.

Benzion, Varon. Right. Yeah. Varan is Spanish. Yeah. Varan. Exactly. Yeah.

And he was an economist, but later in his career or in retirement, he started writing about Sephardi history and language. He did. He did. Yeah. So he was a very typical of Sephardic Jews in Istanbul. He was multilingual. This was part of their world. He and his sisters, his mother had studied at an Alliance Universal, you know, Israeli school in Chenacal. It became a French speaker of a great. a great francophile as Sephardic Jews generally are. So they spoke French in the household. They spoke Turkish. They spoke Judeo-Spanish, Ladino. That was really their main language that they spoke in their household. A little bit of Hebrew, a little bit of Greek.

You know, my father, they had a little place on the island of Bukeda, and he would always say, you know, riding the boat out there, you hear 15 languages, you know, on the boat. Right. This is just the way it was a, they did the sort of code switching thing of, you know, switching back and forth between these languages, depending on the subject they were talking about. And so he became, after his career as an economist in Francophone Africa using his French there, he began to write a lot of family history, not in a purely genealogical way. He wrote a little pamphlet about the name Varon, Spanish just means guy or fellow, whatever.

Was it always a Sephardic name? What's the history? you know, and it took him way beyond our family, but it ended up being a fun project. He wrote about figures he found to be fascinating, Piri, Reese, and others. The most significant work he did, he wrote a lot of reviews for Sephardic Horizon, an important journal in the U.S. that covers all things Sephardic. And he wrote a lot about Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, and about the fate of the language. I mean, he was part of an elderly community in Washington, D.C. of Ladino speakers,

who got together fairly regularly. A great musician named Flory Jagoda, I believe, was her name, Late Preserver of Sephardic Music, was part of this community. They would make familiar cuisine, you know, speak Ladino. But, you know, the story was one that is, sadly, you know, my own nuclear family represents the story. So my father and all of his generation spoke Ladino. I don't, and neither did my brother.

You know, we grew up in the United States. And within this last generation, it's, you know, it's really faded. And my father was philosophical about it. He hoped it would be preserved in schools and universities and libraries and so on. But he was not terribly optimistic about the prospect of it surviving as a spoken language. He felt that somewhere like maybe 300,000, 400,000 people spoke it, but only about 30,000 or 40,000 people are left who speak it well. and that was 20 years ago. So, yeah.

Well, it sounds like you have your next project figured out for you. I mean, you can use your education benefit at UVA here to study Spanish. I know, I really should. One thing after another, but I know the Clara Barton project isn't going to wait for that piece to be added or for you to go back and study Ottoman Turkish. Right. But this project is you're kind of deepening your engagement with the Ottoman context because you're writing a book about Clara Barton's work.

with the Red Cross during this moment of what are known as the Hamidian Massacres, these pogromes against Ottoman Armenians throughout Anatolia during the 1890s. What can people look forward to in this story? Yeah, it's fascinating. So Barton herself is just an utterly remarkable figure, sort of known as a Civil War nurse, a la Florence Nightingale. And she was certainly inspired by Nightingale.

One of the things she does during her, Barton does during her time in Turkey helping Armenians is give a speech to a girl's school at Skutari, you know, singing the praises of Florence Nightingale. Barton's American Red Cross work is absolutely monumental importance. She first begins to be involved with the Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian War. She had come to Europe to recover her health after going on an exhausting speaking tour. the U.S. and the place she goes to recover is Geneva, where she meets the founders of the Red Cross, and they sort of enlist her. She does Franco-Pression war work in Strasbourg largely. And she goes home, and she tries to persuade the U.S. government in these very years that Longstreet, literally, the very years Longstreet is serving as a minister, she tries to persuade the U.S. government to sign the Geneva Convention Treaty and to establish an American Red Cross, and the U.S. government demures. They don't want, you know,

entangling alliances and so on, but she finally persuades them. And part of the way she persuades them to sign the Red Cross treaty is by saying the Red Cross should not only sort of spring into action in times of warfare to help the wounded and protect medical workers, it should also help in natural disasters, environmental disasters, hurricanes, floods, etc. The so-called American amendment to the Geneva Convention. And again, sort of a monumental breakthrough to think about government having to assume some responsibility in the case of environmental disaster. So she does all kinds of work in settings in the U.S. I won't go on and on, but the Johnstown flood, the Sea Islands hurricane and so on.

She's a seasoned veteran of relief work. And she's, you know, called upon by concerned Americans in the mid-1890s to take this Red Cross work to help Armenian victims of the Hamedian massacres. Which is as far from a natural disaster as you can go, it's highly political. It's highly political. So she knows this. And she wants to get access from the Sultan and his government to the communities in the hinterlands to Marash and Zaitun and Harput and other places that are scenes of terrible suffering. And in order to secure, I'm going to be simplifying a complicated story and the book will tell it in more detail, but he said what to look forward to. It's quite a sort of diplomatic dance she does here. She has to essentially persuade the Sultan and his ministers and so on that she's there to help both Turks and Armenians, that she's there to prevent disease and starvation. So she's kind of taking the emphasis off the political aspects of it, that she will not embarrass the Turkish government, that she's She won't bring the team of reporters with her that's sending stories back to America every minute about the, you know, political context for all of this. She'll stay away from issues of guilt and complicity and blame and so on and just focus on the humanitarian message. And this is very difficult for her because even as she's pressing this case, both in the Court of Public Opinion to American officials and to Turkish officials, on the scene, she's there in Istanbul, she has teams of eight.

She has teams of agents who she's preparing to send out to the hinterlands. Americans are saying this is a, you know, this is a religious war between Islam and Christianity. And Barton is carrying the flag of Christianity. And, you know, the Turkish authorities want the Red Cross to be a Red Crescent. Barton says, fine, I don't care. You know, I don't care what's on the flag. As long as we're getting the supplies there, Americans are saying this is a clash of civilizations. and to make a long story short, Barton's, in so many words, Barton's messages, please stop saying that.

That's not helping me. If we think of this as a clash of civilizations, I will never get diplomatic permission to go and do my work. She eventually does get diplomatic permission. She does recognize Turkish complicity, you know, authorship of the massacres. She's a little taken in by some propaganda initially, you know. It says it's the Circassians. It's the Kurds, you know, doing the dirty work or whatever. But she comes to recognize what's really going on and to acknowledge it in private letters

and to acknowledge it to a certain extent in a pragmatic way in her published work in America. So she doesn't dodge the question, but she waits until the work is done before she really addresses in any serious way questions of complicity, you know, and guilt and blame. And this is in step with what... the American government's position on it. It's a tragedy. They're massacres. But officially, the Ottoman government is not complicit is sort of what the narrative

that the U.S. accepts. Yeah. I mean, interestingly on that, you know, she publishes a report on her time in Armenia. And it just is a refl whether the report is mimicking the government position is even weaker in its acknowledgement of what's really going on than the government. position or is is more staunchly critical than the government is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Right.

So the report itself can be read multiple ways and is, which just tells you that this is, as you said, so highly political. Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating story that's really foreshadowing America's role in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Yeah. As the humanitarian neutral power, yet the nearest relief propaganda that Americans are getting at home is like very anti-Turkish, very Islamophobic.

Yes. And in the end, Americans ends up kind of accepting this compromise to some extent. Yeah. And that has left a legacy not only for the history of the region, but also how the history of the Armenian genocide and any topic related to it was written for many generations in the U.S. That's right. And I mean, that's so illuminating.

And I'll just say just quickly, parenthetically, that that her stint, you know, I mean, just like Longstreet's short stint in the Ottoman Empire sort of points to other bigger stories, Barton's Armenian relief is part also of a bigger gender history, women's history story. Part of what Barton's trying to do at this moment and throughout her career is to say women can be authorities on armies, warfare, diplomacy, statecraft, you know? And so she stakes a claim to being a state's woman long before women can vote. And this will prove controversial. She'll eventually be essentially forced out of the Red Cross by critics who don't like her leadership style. But she's trying to sort of strike a blow for the idea that women deserve a seat at the table when decisions about war and peace are made. Well, we're looking forward to that book.

This conversation kind of touched on a lot of different things. that we've covered before on the Ottoman History podcast tangentially. And we do have links to those episodes where people can keep listening to learn more about everything that's come up in this. We also have a link to our conversation between Professor Varon and the Class of History 2001 at University of Virginia about what is really an impressive career of publication would make any Ottoman historian just astonished at how many different things you've published and written about and are still publishing and writing about. So we want to direct our listeners

to the webpage to check out all that material if you enjoyed our conversation with Elizabeth Varen. Professor Varen, thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you so much, Chris. My great pleasure. Thanks to everyone for tuning in and join us next time on the Ottoman History Podcast.