Repository of DUTH

Karamanlidika publications in the service of the Protestant missionary penetration into the Roman millet of the Ottoman Empire: (Doctoral thesis)

Πεγκλίδου, Ειρήνη/ Pegklidou, Eirini

This doctoral thesis concerns the first Protestant children's magazine ‘Messenger’ that was published in the Ottoman Empire, specifically in Cappadocia, from 1872 to 1896. The publishers of the magazine were the American Protestant Missionaries, who had founded at the beginning of the 19th century, in Boston, the Protestant American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM). ABCFM's goal was to spread Christianity throughout the world and its Renaissance, as defined by the Protestant ethic. Protestantism sought to become the universal version of Christianity that would unite all Christians and succeed in converting those who had not embraced the Protestant doctrine. For the Protestants, these goals, i.e. the conversion of the peoples and their rebirth, would be easily achieved by starting with the education of children, especially girls, with the reasoning that as future mothers, they would pass on the Protestant ethic to their children with the result the fastest spread of Protestantism.