Educating across Cultures: Anatolia College in Turkey and Greece

(Paperback)

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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 Colleges 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 Anatolias 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 Colleges 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 Turkeys 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 Greeces 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.

Reviews

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 schools changing identity alongside major political and social events. At the same time, the author was a key figure in the schools 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. * Journal of Modern Greek Studies *
Educating across Cultures: Anatolia College in Turkey and Greece is William McGrews well-written, detailed, thoughtful, and, at times, intensely personal account of Anatolia College.... William McGrew has written a masterful study chronicling the triumphs and tragedies of Anatolia College as they unfolded over two continents, multiple cultures, and nearly 120 years. Not only is his recounting of Anatolias unique past exemplary, but his balanced and sensitive contextualization is a wonderful achievement. The book promises to find an enthusiastic readership among the thousands of Anatolia alumni and friends. Even if one has no direct connection to the school, however, the mixture of human drama, bureaucratic struggles, and political crises will keep one engaged. * Modern Greek Studies Yearbook *
A moving history of Anatolia College and its perseverance and renewal through turbulent periods of modern history. * Kathimerini *
[The author is] an American educator who has become Greek in soul and spirit conveys the legend of Anatolia College, an institution influential in the history of both Asia Minor and Greece, and whose graduates continue to play leading roles in the current affairs of the region. * Ethnos *
A riveting history of a remarkable cross-cultural/educational experiment. Its unlikely success seems miraculous, but Bill McGrews inspirational story shows it to be the result of the sustained, undergirding values of educators who then instilled it in their students: Not for ourselves alone are we born. Throughout this compelling account runs a stream of seemingly insurmountable challenges that leave the reader awed by the dedicated, innovative leaders and staff who overcame them. -- Stanley Aschenbrenner, Emeritus, University of Minnesota
Educating across Culturesmade me appreciate for the first time what brave, dedicated people the American nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries were (especially the women): what they endured, accomplished, then reinvented in Greece after their Anatolian achievements were destroyed. William McGrews detailed history of a single foreign school also helped me to understand the long-standing features of Greek governance in more than education, based as those features are on the states vast authority as the embodiment of nationhood. Hence this meticulous account of Anatolia Colleges initial phase in the Ottoman Empire plus Turkey, then of its rebuilding in Greece, illuminates much more broadly both the American and Greek cultures. -- Peter Bien, Dartmouth College

Author Bio

William McGrew was president of Anatolia College from 1974 to 1999, and subsequently of the American Farm School, also in Thessaloniki, from 2005 to 2009. Earlier he served as a U.S. diplomat with assignments in Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. McGrew holds a PhD in Greek and Modern European History. His previous publications include Land and Revolution in Modern Greece, 18001881.