Prospects and Challenges: The Study of Early Turkish Immigration to the United States

JOHN J. GRABOWSKI

IN 1911, AHMET EMIN YALMAN, a recently enrolled student at Columbia University decided to take a brief holiday to a coastal town in Maine. The reception accorded to Yalman and a friend who had accompanied him was less than cordial. According to Yalman, the people in the coastal town had changed all the locks on their doors, and even that of the jail because they heard the "Turks were coming." Once the townspeople had met the two students, both of whom were Turkish, the atmosphere warmed and, as Yalman recalls, friendship blossomed. These recollections, written some years after the event, may or may not be wholly accurate and, indeed, may be colored to make a point. However, they do attest to an important fact. Many Americans in the early twentieth century had created a particular image of the Turk, one that was tinted by Orientalist expectations, relatively recent news about wars in Bulgaria and unrest in Anatolia, and perhaps even by a cultural memory of Turks at the gates of Vienna and western Europe. Yalman's arrival in the coastal town was very likely the first opportunity its inhabitants had to actually encounter a Turk and a Muslim.