ABSTRACT
Armenian society in early nineteenth-century Transcaucasia was experiencing continual movement and communal fragmentation, and historic Armenian territory was a zone of competition between the Persian, Ottoman, and the Russian Empires. Yet over the course of the century a new generation of Armenian journalists, scholars, and writers worked to transform their geographically, socially, and linguistically fragmented communities threatened by regional isolation and dissent, into a patriotic and nationally conscious population. One cannot contemplate modern Armenian history without addressing the question of how this profoundly divided society managed to achieve a common cultural bond.
