CTAD-CUMHURIYET TARIHI ARASTIRMALARI DERGISI, cilt.8, sa.15, ss.51-68, 2012 (ESCI)
During the World War I (WWI), Asia Minor experienced another historic in and out population flow, specifically through the deportation of the Armenian people in 1915 and the mutual exchange of Muslim population in Balkans and Greek population in Asia Minor throughout the 1910s and afterwards. At the end of the WWI, following its century-old missionary activities among the Armenians and Greeks in Asia Minor, The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions came to the point of a vital decision regarding its future work: now the mission was to preach among Muslim population in Asia Minor through all missionary leftovers and its experience from the Ottoman past. In this paper, I aim to shed light on the massive shift of strategy towards the target groups and also the new mission of the American Board in Asia Minor by examining sheer amount of untouched archival documents, especially the Board's correspondences. Moreover, I will analyze the details of the prospective mission strategy of the Board missionaries in order to bring a retrospective understanding on the mission strategies during Ottoman past through the aforementioned archival materials.