Americans in a Splintering Europe: Refugees, Missionaries and Journalists in World War I

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World War I started in August 1914, but the United States did not enter it until April 6, 1917. The outbreak causes thousands of American civilians to become refugees desperate to get away from the warzone. American journalists, on the other hand, rushed to Europe to cover the fighting, many of them quite eccentric. Richard Harding Davis, for example, had a fear of women and carried a passport with a photo of him wearing a faux military uniform that nearly got him shot by the Germans as a spy.

In the Ottoman Empire and Persia (Iran), American missionaries lived in isolated areas with little infrastructure, the very places from which the Ottomans began deporting the Empire’s Armenians east to the desert where those not outright massacred were expected to die of thirst and hunger. In Van, Doctor Clarence D. Ussher did what he could to aid the city’s Armenians under siege by the Ottoman army, though in the end he and other U.S. citizens had to flee for their lives. American missionaries in the city of Urmia faced a similar crisis when the Ottomans forced the Russians out of the area.