As the central focus of my senior thesis at Oberlin College, I have chosen to edit Stanley Kerr's correspondence of 1919-1920. This correspondence of nearly 300 pages is a detailed observation by a young American relief worker of the aftermath of the Armenian genocide and deportations in Allied occupied post-war Turkey. My purpose is not to provide a commentary on the correspondence. Rather, it is to reproduce the letters in their original form in order present new primary material for historians. I also envision a possible M.A. or Ph.D. thesis using this collection. Therefore, I feel that I have only begun to scratch the surface in terms of what can be learned from the archives.
My presentation of the correspondence includes a paper which provides a historical background to the position of the Armenians in Turkey during World War One. I seek to explain the historical events which brought about the Armenian opposition to the government of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the reasons for which the Ottoman Turks found it necessary to systematically deport all of Turkey's Armenian population and why two-thirds of the Armenians were massacred in the process. The purpose of the paper is to provide a historical background to the Armenian Question in Turkey and a setting for post World War One Marash and the situation my grandfather encountered there.