Louis Farshee > Quotes

“One would think that a cataclysm that reportedly claimed tens of thousands of lives through starvation and disease would have been as traumatic to the Lebanese as genocide was to the Armenians and would have warranted some sort of public memorial.”
― Louis Farshee, Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I

“The people of the Mountain were more self-sustaining than the Beirutis. Most of them had modest pieces of land on which they grew vegetables.”
― Louis Farshee, Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I

“The Lebanese government has officially recognized the Armenian genocide, but nowhere is there any official memorial to the victims of the World War I famine.”
― Louis Farshee, Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I

“Naoum, Sarkis, transporter of goods, humanitarian and master smuggler, a.k.a. the “Hero of ’14”
― Louis Farshee, Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I

“The capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople, still carried the name given to it in the year 330, when it became the imperial capital for the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. In World War I literature it is sometimes referred to as Istanbul or Stambul, but Constantinople did not officially become Istanbul until the Turkish parliament passed legislation to this effect in 1930.”
― Louis Farshee, Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I

“On the other hand, the claim ignores the fact that 300,000 Lebanese men and women emigrated to the West between 1890 and 1914.16 Had the Mutasarrifiyah been as successful as some purport, there might have been fewer immigrants willing to leave their homeland in search of economic opportunity abroad.”
― Louis Farshee, Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I

“Unlike Syria, Mount Lebanon was not a land with a diverse topography, but mostly mountainous. Fawwaz Traboulsi wrote that the amount of cultivable land in Mount Lebanon was four percent of the total surface, or approximately forty-nine square miles. Of this area, about twenty-two square miles, or nearly half, was cultivated with toot shami, the Damascus mulberry tree.12 One variety of this tree produces a large, edible white berry, the other a black berry. The primary produce obtained from this tree was not the berries for human consumption, but its leaves on which silkworms fed.13 Traboulsi’s study indicates that the maximum land area available for food crop cultivation in Mount Lebanon was twenty-seven square miles,”
― Louis Farshee, Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I

“For example, the people of Mount Lebanon were identified as “Syrians” until well into the 1940s. In the United States, the ethnic designation “Lebanese” came into popular usage only after World War II.”
― Louis Farshee, Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I