ABSTRACT
On the morning of September 3, 1901, when Miss Ellen Stone, an American missionary to Turkey, said farewell to the small Protestant congregation of Bansko, a village in the Slavic provinces of the Ottoman Empire, she could hardly imagine that she would soon become a figure of national honor in America and the subject of intense diplomatic negotiations among the great powers. A deeper reason why Stone's kidnapping drew such extraordinary international attention is that it raised the ghost of the Eastern Question, a political issue that plagued European diplomacy for most of the nineteenth century. Moreover, by presenting the incident as an ideological rationale for the political rapprochement between the United Sates and Great Britain, the accounts of Stone's captivity served to strengthen Anglo-American cultural and racial solidarity by highlighting the urgency to "defend" Western civilization from the barbaric other.
