Tales Too Horrible for Belief: Atrocity Narratives and Peripheral Subjects in Hezekiah Niles’ Reporting on the Greek Revolution

Abstract

ABSTRACT From 1821 to 1830, Americans took an intense interest in the Greek Revolution. Their experiences of the revolution were, with very few exceptions, entirely textually mediated. In this context, nationally prominent editors such as Hezikiah Niles of Baltimore exercised an outsized influence over how people understood the war. Niles’s reporting on the conflict revolved around atrocity narratives in which “monstrous” Turks slaughtered innocent, “civilized” Greek Christians before an uncaring world. In his writing, Eastern barbarity and European conspiracy combined to present a stark case of American moral exceptionalism, which has long been a normative assumption of public understandings of foreign policy. I argue that Niles’s atrocity narratives hinged on the figure of “peripheral subjects,” or onlookers to atrocities who bear a moral responsibility for their melioration. By focusing on the in/actions of European peripheral subjects, philhellenes used the excessive violence in Greece as a means of denouncing America’s rival powers and thereby creating rhetorical space for an exceptional American national identity.