Books

Joan Schoettler

Grade Level: 4th-7th grade

In 1920, eight-year-old Bedros fled Armenia with his young sisters, grandmother, and uncle to escape the Turkish soldiers invading their town. But in the confusion, Bedros lost sight of the adults and was left alone to protect his (more…)

by Chris Bohjalian

Grade Level: Tenth Grade to Adult

In The Sandcastle Girls, Bohjalian creates an intergenerational tale firmly founded in the history of the Armenian Genocide. His characters take the reader back in time to Syria, and he recreates with astounding detail the tragedies faced by the Armenian people during the first modern genocide of the twentieth century. (more…)

by Maral Boyadjian

Grade Level: Ninth grade to Adult

Set in the Ottoman Empire in late summer of 1913, As the Poppies Bloomed tells the story of young lovers Anno and Daron, who fall in love as their Armenian village, comes under increasing threat by Turkish authorities in the period leading up to the Armenian Genocide. They couple wants to marry and continue life in their homeland, but they’re unprepared for the dangerous secret Daron’s father keeps or the dark days ahead. (more…)

by Dana Walrath

Grade Level: Eighth Grade to Adult

Like Water on Stone by Dana Walrath is a fictional account of the Armenian genocide. This novel in verse recounts the flight to America of three Armenian children after the Ottoman Turks confiscate their family’s flour mill and murder their parents. For sixty-three days the children travel on foot, above the tree line of the Caucasus Mountains and through the Syrian Desert, to reach refuge in Aleppo, Syria. Taken in by a sympathetic Arab shopkeeper, the children disguise themselves as Arabs to avoid being forcibly relocated to the Deir el-Zor concentration camp, where starvation and barbarity led to certain death. After three years in hiding, the children finally receive a letter and boat tickets to America from their maternal uncle. (Random House)

Teaching Guide available for download

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by Adam Bagdasarian

Grade Level: Ninth to Twelfth Grade
Brutally vivid, Adam Bagdasarian’s Forgotten Fire is based on the experiences of his great-uncle during the Armenian Holocaust. The abhorrent events of the genocide that Bagdasarian describes are almost unbearable, yet his style of writing is such that one can manage to read through this astonishing description of one of the worst human rights catastrophes in human history.
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by Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
Marcom weaves the fates of five individuals caught in the riptide of the Armenian genocide. The stories loop and twist together with poetic language that will stay with the reader for years to come. Marcom is a wordsmith of genius who uses postmodern structure to tell the tale of a hundred-year-old crime.
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by Nancy Kricorian

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
This book starts in a suburb of Boston with the passing of Zabelle Chahasbanian, an elderly grandmother whose history remains obscure to her family. The story traces back to Zabelle’s adolescence in the waning days of Ottoman Turkey, where she survives the 1915 Armenian genocide and near starvation in the Syrian dessert. Zabelle’s story includes years in an Istanbul orphanage through her fortune in finding her way to the United States.
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by David Kherdian

Grade Level: Eighth to Tenth Grade
David Kherdian tells his mother’s story of survival of the Armenian genocide in her voice. Vernon Dumehjian Kherdian was born into a caring and prosperous family. In 1915, the Turkish government started the orderly devastation of its Armenian populace. Her life changed forever.
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Dawn Anahid MacKeen

Growing up, Dawn MacKeen heard from her mother how her grandfather Stepan miraculously escaped from the Turks during the Armenian genocide of 1915, when more than one million people—half the Armenian population—were killed. In The Hundred-Year Walk, MacKeen (more…)

Ellen Sarkisian Chestnut

Deli Sarkis: The Scars He Carried tells the story of Deli Sarkis, an Armenian who witnessed first-hand the atrocities of the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923. The book is a tale of two journeys: the author’s journey to discover the facts, places, and people in order to write her father’s story, and her father’s journey from near death to survival. Deli Sarkis’s physical and emotional scars were a constant reminder of the horrifying times he endured and the loss of so many he loved.

Lesson Plan Available for Download

A memoir by Karnig Panian

When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly 1,000 Armenian and 400 Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care.

This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years—as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage.

Read excerpts from the memoir HERE

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by M. Salpi

A collection of autobiographical short stories from survivors of the 1915 Genocide of the Armenians, Our Cross was written by Aram Sahakian under the pen name M. Salpi. Sahakian, a medical officer in the Turkish army during the First World War, met many Armenian soldiers and officers who recounted to him the plight of their families following the Turkish deportations and massacres of their communities. After his capture by the British, Sahakian was appointed resident doctor at an Armenian refugee camp in Port Said, Egypt. (more…)

by Lorna Touryan Miller, Donald Eugene

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
Through interviews with a hundred elderly Armenians, Donald and Lorna Miller give the “forgotten genocide” the hearing it deserves.Combining a compelling oral history with a trenchant analysis of the first major genocide of the 20th century, this moving study focuses on the Turkish murder of more than one million Armenians between 1915 and 1923 in a systematic campaign of mass deportations, slaughter, forced labor and starvation.
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by Vahram Dadrian
trans. Agop Hacikyan;
ed. and intro. Ara Sarafian

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
To the Desert: Pages from My Diary, is a somewhat unusual narrative written by a child survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Vahram relates the fate of thousands of Armenians who were not sent to Der Zor in 1915, but to the wastelands south of Aleppo, as far as Maan and Es Salt in Jordan.
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by Mae Derdarian

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
This is the heart-rending, true story of a girl’s indomitable will to survive the 20th century’s first genocide.
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by Alan Whitehorn, Editor

Structured similar to an encyclopedia, The Armenian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide begins with seven introductory essays providing a broad overview of the Armenian Genocide, followed by individual entries on all aspects of the genocide: key events, people, organizations, images, maps, a detailed chronology, and a selection of documents relating to the causes, phases, and consequences of the Armenian Genocide. Through contributions from leading authors on the topic, the guide also explores various political, historical, and cultural perspectives providing readers an insight into some of the most controversial and significant issues relating to the Armenian Genocide. The primary source documents are prefaced by introductions providing useful context to help educators and students understand the relevance of the material.

ABC-Clio Greenwood, Santa Barbara, CA, 2015

By Christopher Walker

Grade Level: Adult
Christopher Walker charts the history of the Armenians from the Armenian Genocide to the 1988 earthquake.
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By Edward Alexander

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
A Crime of Vengeance relates Turkey’s massacre of Armenians in 1915 and the six-year hunt and assassination of former Grand Visier Talaat Pasha as revealed in an internationally-covered Berlin murder trial in 1921.

By Samuel Totten (Editor), William S. Parsons (Editor), Israel W. Charny (Editor)

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
Through scholarly analyses and historical data, and eyewitness accounts, the contributors to this volume delineate the antecedents to and the causes and results of genocide in the twentieth century.
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By Richard G. Hovannisian (Editor)

Grade Level: Adult
This volume argues that the time has come for Turkey to reassess the propriety of its approach, and to begin the process that will allow it move into a post-genocide era.
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Israel W. Charny, Editor
Rouben Paul Adalian, Steven L. Jacobs, Eric Markusen, and Samuel Totten, Associate Editors

Grade Level: Reference
This encyclopedia is the first reference work to document the full extent of the past and present of this awful subject with authority and objectivity, while also looking to the future and showing how education about the subject can perhaps lead to a world where genocide is better anticipated and prevented.
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by Robert Melson

Grade Level: Adult
In a study that compares the major attempts at genocide in world history, Robert Melson creates a sophisticated framework that links genocide to revolution and war.
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by Ara Sarafian (Editor/Compiler)

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
This valuable publication includes the “core materials” that informed U.S. officials in Washington, D.C. about the senseless mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.
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Richard D. Kloian, Editor
Heritage Publishing, 1985, 1992, 1996, 2005, 400 pages

Grade Level: Ninth Grade to Adult
This compilation of 200 full-length articles from The New York Times and over 60 full-length articles from 14 American journals of the time reprises the day-to-day reporting of the genocide. Included are photographs, maps, and official documents, including the Turkish Military Tribunal of 1918 that found Turkey’s former leaders guilty of ordering the Armenian massacres.
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By Vahakn N. Dadrian

Grade Level: Adult
This study by the most distinguished scholar of the Armenian tragedy offers an authoritative analysis by presenting it as a case study of genocide and by seeing it as an historical process in which a domestic conflict escalated and was finally consumed by global war.
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The Case of Soghomon Tehlirian (Armenian Political Trials: Proceedings 1)
Translated from German by Vartkes Yeghiayan

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
Soghomon Tehlirian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, assassinated Talaat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian Genocide, in Berlin in 1921. Although there was no doubt Tehlirian committed the murder, the jury found him not guilty, after hearing 2 days of gripping testimony about the genocide planned and executed by Talaat Pasha. The trial helped motivate Raphael Lemkin to coin the word “Genocide.”

GenEd’s 2-day mock trial includes a condensed version of several key trial witness testimonies and concluding arguments. (more…)

by Peter Balakian
Debuted #4 on New York Time’s Best Sellers List

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
Balakian exposes the roots of the genocide in the “total war” atmosphere of WWI, which combusted with the pan-Turkish nationalism of the Young Turk government, inflamed Muslim rage against “infidel” Armenian Christians, and a long-simmering Ottoman hatred of the Armenians dating to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and his slaughters in the 1890s.
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by Leslie A. Davis
Edited, with an introduction and notes by Susan K. Blair

Grade Level: Adult
A searing indictment of the Ottoman Turkish government for its brutal massacre and deportation of its Armenian population in 1915-1923 by Leslie Davis who as the U. S. consul in Harput from 1915 to 1917 was an eyewitness to the atrocities committed upon Armenians.
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by Henry Morgenthau, Peter Balakian (Editor) with a foreword by Robert Jay Lifton, an introduction by Roger W. Smith, and an epilogue by Henry Morgenthau III

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
Originally published in 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story is one of the most insightful and compelling accounts of what became a recurring horror during the 20th century: ethnic cleansing and genocide.
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by Michael J. Arlen, Clark Blaise (Introduction)
National Book Award Winner, 1976

Grade Level: Ninth Grade to Adult
Passage to Ararat echoes current headlines as Arlen examines the 1915 “ethnic cleansing” [genocide] of the Armenian race by the Turks.  In Armenia, Arlen comes to understand his father’s detachment from his past when he sees what it means when a people are “hated to death”. A deeply felt, personal memoir with a new introduction by Clark Blaise. (more…)

PEN Albrand Award Winner

Grade Level: Eleventh Grade to Adult
The author of four volumes of verse, Peter Balakian writes with the precision of a poet and the lyricism of a privileged suburban child in 1950s New Jersey.
He is shadowed by his relatives’ carefully guarded memories of past trauma: the brutal Turkish extermination in 1915 of more than a million Armenians, including most of his maternal grandmother’s family. Balakian seamlessly interweaves personal and historical material to depict one young man’s reclamation of his heritage and to scathingly indict the political forces that conspired to sweep under the rug the 20th century’s first genocide. (more…)