On May 17, Anne Elbrecht of Davis, Calif., will give a lecture entitled “Telling the Story: The Armenian Genocide in The New York Times and Missionary Herald,” at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) Center in Belmont, Mass., according to The Armenian Weekly.

Elbrecht’s Telling the Story: The Armenian Genocide in The New York Times and Missionary Herald, 1914-1918 (Taderon Press, 2012) focuses on two important journals to see how news of the Armenian Genocide filtered through to the United States between 1914-18. It also looks at how the American public reacted to such news with a humanitarian intervention program.

There were undoubted differences between the two journals, as The New York Times was a leading news organization while Missionary Herald was part of an institution (the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) with vested interests in Turkey. However, the flow of information to the outside world was clear and compelling, especially as many reports were actually written by United States officials in Turkey and leaked to the press by the State Department in Washington, D.C.

Elbrecht is a graduate of Wheaton College, University of California, Berkeley, School of Library Studies, and McGeorge School of Law. Telling the Story is based on her MA thesis at California State University, Sacramento. With her late husband Richard A. Elbrecht she traveled throughout Turkey photographing Armenian churches, a visual archive now part of the Armenian Studies Program at California State University, Fresno. She has been a member of NAASR’s Board of Directors since 2007.

Telling the Story will be available for purchase and signing the night of the lecture.