Stranger in a Not-So-Strange Land:
Teaching and Living the Gilded Age
and Progressive Era in Turkey¹

Russell L. Johnson
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
(formerly of Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey)

Images of Turkey in the United States during the Gilded Age were generally not flattering. For the most part, Turks appeared in Gilded Age serious journals and popular press as "blood-thirsty," "savages," and "the most brutal outcasts of the human race," who were merely "camping in Europe" ø albeit for five hundred years ø but not a part of it. A "pitiable imbecility" was said to characterize the Ottoman Empire, with the Turks having shown an "utter incapacity for just, enlightened, progressive government." Looking at Turkey in 1877, an American army officer concluded that in order "to reform Turkey" it would be necessary first "to abolish the Turks." At the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, according to historians Gail Bederman and Robert Rydell, the location of the Turkish village on the Midway clearly placed Turkey among the "barbarous" nations of the world; at the Turkish village, as Bederman puts it, "unmanly, dark-skinned men cajoled customers to shed their manly restraint and savor their countrywomen's sensuous dancing." Even Mark Twain quipped that "I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little ø not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell."2	1
More than one hundred years later, I found myself an American teaching Turkish students about the U.S. Gilded Age and Progressive Era (among other U.S. history topics). In part, at least, because of the negative Gilded Age image of Turkey, when Maureen Flanagan offered me the opportunity to reflect on my experience in Turkey for the JGAPE, I readily accepted. The task proved more difficult than anticipated, however. Making sense of my experience in Turkey was difficult enough, but the need to convey that experience to an audience for most of whom Turkey remains a strange and mysterious place presented an even greater challenge. I want to begin by describing my university, the history department, and my place in both. Since the university where I taught, Bilkent University in the capital, Ankara, is largely unknown outside of Turkey, I hope I will be forgiven if I engage in a little old-fashioned Gilded Age-style boosterism. I will then describe the students' interests and the way they seemed to respond to the history of the United States in general and the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in particular.  And finally, I will conclude with some observations about how teaching and living in Turkey at the turn of the twenty-first century has given me a new perspective on the history of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.  To an audience interested in the U.S. Gilded Age and Progressive Era maybe Turkey is not so mysterious after all.	2
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