Armenian Village Life Before 1914 is a non-fiction book by Susie Hoogasian Villa and Mary Kilbourne Matossian, published in 1982 by Wayne State University Press.
The authors interviewed Armenian immigrants living in Metro Detroit. [1] They recalled their lives prior to the Armenian genocide. [2]
Villa had edited 100 Armenian Tales and Their Folkloristic Relevance , a book that had Armenian folktales, and had attended the Folklore Institute of Indiana University so she could learn about folklore. Villa died in 1978. Matossian worked as a historian at the University of Maryland. [2]
There were 48 interview subjects. Most of the interviews occurred in the 1970s and up to the date of publication of the book. Some interviews from the 1940s were used; Villa had conducted the 1940s interviews. The historical sourcing included studies of the anthropology of the area in areas near Ottoman Armenia as well as narratives of trabeling in the region and ethnography documents made by Soviet ethnic Armenians. [2]
Matossian completed the work after obtaining the manuscript by adding sourcing. [2]
Villa had sent the manuscript of the book to the publisher which allowed other people to complete the work. [2] The publisher then asked Matossian to finish the book. Villa and Matossian never met one another. [3]
The chapters are organized thematically. [1]
Biographies of the interviewees are stated at the end of the work. [1]
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Avakian and Halpern wrote that the work is "an excellent beginning" to documenting the lives of families of pre-genocide Armenian settlements in the Ottoman Empire. [2]
Daniel G. Bates of Hunter College described the work as a "labor of love" and stated that the interviewing gave the book value. [1] Bates added that sometimes the work is "uneven" in putting information into context. [1]
The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children.
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Armenian Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community of the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia. The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the United States took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the United States following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, the Adana massacre of 1909, and the Armenian genocide of 1915–1918 in the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1950s many Armenians from the Middle East migrated to the United States as a result of political instability in the region. It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons. The Los Angeles area has the largest Armenian population in the United States.
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Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, former professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University (Turkey), was awarded the Order of Merit of Turkey, and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM). His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.
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Impunity is the ability to act with exemption from punishments, losses, or other negative consequences. In the international law of human rights, impunity is failure to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice and, as such, itself constitutes a denial of the victims' right to justice and redress. Impunity is especially common in countries which lack the tradition of rule of law, or suffer from pervasive corruption, or contain entrenched systems of patronage, or where the judiciary is weak or members of the security forces are protected by special jurisdictions or immunities. Impunity is sometimes considered a form of denialism of historical crimes.
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100 Armenian Tales and Their Folkloristic Relevance is a 1966 non-fiction book edited by Susie Hoogasian Villa, published by Wayne State University Press.