This article presents an appeal written in 1919-1920 by Turkey's first major woman writer, novelist and newspaper reporter Halide Edib (Adıvar), to the people of the United States, entrusted to Lewis Edgar Browne, who was covering the Turkish War for Independence and the Russian Revolution and Civil War for the Chicago Daily News while the Paris Peace Conference was going on. Halide Edib believed that the people of the United States were without bias in considering the problems of the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I, and, that, as had been stated in President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, they wanted all the peoples of the Empire, including the Turks, to achieve independence in their own lands following the war. In her statement, she condemned the efforts then being made in Paris to blame on the Turks alone all the excesses and abuses that had gone in the war, pointing out that all the peoples of the Empire had sinned and been sinned against, all had suffered terribly from massacre and starvation, not only the Sultan's Christian subjects, and that the Turks, like the others, therefore deserved to achive independence in the areas of Anatolia and Thrace where they constituted large majorities of the population. In the end, this appeal fell on deaf ears. Halide Edib did not understand that the minds of the people of the Christian West had been so poisoned against Muslims by wartime propaganda that the accusations were being used as pretexts to deny to them rights that were being granted to their Christian neighbors. In the end, it was not such appeals for justice and understanding, then, but the force applied by the Turkish national resistance movement led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk that achived an independent existance for the Empire's Turkish subjects as a result of the Lausanne Conference and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923.

When I first came to the Başbakanlık Arşivi at its old location in the İstanbul Provincial Governorship's Vilayet Bahçesi in 1956, opportunities for research were extremely limited. The only collections that were readily available were the Mühimme and Mühimme-i Mısır registers of Imperial fermans, themselves not entirely complete, the mass of financial registers heaped together in the Kâmil Kepeci collection, and the thousands of documents brought together in the Ali Emin, Ibn ul-Emin, Cevdet and Fekete collections.

As a result of the tension now existing between Israel and the Muslim world, it long has been assumed that the anti Semitism to which Jews of the Ottoman Empire were subjected over the centuries was the result of Muslim antipathy for Judaism and Jews, and that it was carried out largely by Muslims. This idea was spread by Christian nationalist groups within and outside the Ottoman Empire for the purpose of gaining the support of world Jewry for their causes. At times, moreover, these groups even stimulated Muslim attacks on their own people to gain the support of the Christian nations of Europe.

Londra Üniversitesi'nin Doğu ve Afrika Araştırmaları Okulu'nda Türk Dili Profesörü (Emeritus) Paul August Wittek'in 13 Haziran, 1978'de 84 yaşında yaşama gözlerini kapaması ile, Osmanlı ve Türk tarihi üzerinde yapılan araştırmalarda yeni bir çağ sona ermektedir. Paul Wittek, Avusturya - Macaristan İmparatorluğu devrinde, Viyana yakınında Baden'de bir Çek ailesinin oğlu olarak dünyaya geldi. Birinci Dünya Savaşı sırasında Rus cephesinde topçu subayı olarak hizmet etti. Başından aldığı ciddi bir yaranın (yaşamının sonraki yıllarında öğrencilerinin, başındaki bu çukur yara izine dokunmalarını istemekten hoşlanırdı) iyileşmesi üzerine, Osmanlı Genelkurmayı'nda danışman olarak görevlendirildi; savaşın son günlerinde Filistin cephesinde hizmet etti. Kendisinin sonradan anlattığı gibi, güneydoğu Avrupa üzerinden İstanbul'a giden bir askeri trende yolculuk ederken Türkçe öğrenmeye başlamıştı. Devrin birçok önemli Osmanlı liderleri ve ayrıca Gelibolu savaşı sırasında ve sonrasında Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ile tanıştı. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk'ü çok zeki, o sırada Osmanlı ordusunda hizmet etmekte olan birçok Alman ve Avusturyalı subaylarının, Türklere ve Müslümanlara karşı takındıkları kendini beğenmiş tavırlara aldırış etmeyen bir kişi olarak tanımlamaktaydı.