Shortly after their marriage in Longmeadow, Mass., on May 2, 1907, Charlotte (nee Allen) and Edwin St. John Ward set off together as missionaries with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. For seven years on the cusp of World War I, the couple lived in the Ottoman Empire, raising a family in a succession of cities in present day Turkey and Lebanon.

Given the scope of the Wards’ activities, the term “missionaries” might be somewhat misleading. A medical doctor, Edwin (b. 1880) worked in ABCFM hospitals and universities, and he eventually left the Board to focus on medicine. While in the Levant, Edwin lectured at Aintab College (Turkey) and Syrian Protestant College (Beirut) — the latter of which became the American University in 1920. While at Aintab, he and his wife struck up a friendship with the college president, Fred D. Shepard, who gained a measure of fame when his biography, Shepard of Aintab, appeared in 1920. The book, by Alice Shepard Riggs, was intended to give Sunday School students a positive role model, but since its republication in 2001, it has become a resource for those interested in exploring missionary life in the Middle East during the 20th century.

In Beirut, the Wards became acquainted with Howard Bliss, the second president of Syrian Protestant College, and the son of the college’s founder, Daniel Bliss. Established in 1866, Syrian Protestant College became an important intellectual hub and center of newspapers and scientific publication, and it played a prominent role in bringing Beirut into the 19th century Arab Renaissance, al-Nahda. Most of the scholarship on Protestant missionaries in the Middle East centers on the time of Daniel Bliss, with comparatively little addressing the 20th century. The efforts of the 19th century missionaries to bridge cultural gaps between the West and the East, however, clearly affected the second generation of missionaries, of which Charlotte and Edwin were a part. At the conclusion of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and much of the Arab world looked to America for support in rejecting European colonialist expansion, it was Howard Bliss who suggested to Woodrow Wilson to convene a commission to plumb Arab opinion regarding the building of states in the Middle East. The King-Crane Commission determined that there should be a single Arab state comprised of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, however its conclusions were completely ignored in Europe.

The Wards appear to have left the Ottoman Empire at the start of the First World War. In her final letters, Charlotte discusses the sight of British warships off the coast of Beirut becoming a common sight, and she mentions that she and Edwin were supposed to take a furlough.

The Madeline and Winthrop Goddard Hall collection contains 67 letters addressed to the Halls by Protestant missionaries in the Levant and China during the years immediately prior to the First World War. The majority of these letters (39) were written by Charlotte Ward to Madeline (Taber) Hall, with the remainder from Charlotte’s husband, Edwin St. John Ward, to Madeline’s husband, Winthrop Goddard Hall (1881-1977). The letters are arranged chronologically.

During their years in missionary work, the Wards kept a regular correspondence with their friends at home. Even before arriving in Turkey in late 1907, they wrote 10 letters while traveling on their honeymoon through England (from Leeds, Stratford, and Chester) and Paris, and while cruising off the Greek coast aboard the SS Bagdad. The first stops on their mission were at Aintab and Harpoot, both in central Turkey (now known as Gaziantep and Elazig, respectively), from which Charlotte and Edwin discuss the missionary community, Edwin’s work at Aintab College, and their acquaintance with the president of the College, Fred Shepard.

Late in 1908, the Wards moved to Diarbekir (also Diyarbakir), Turkey, another ABCFM missionary and educational center. During the three or four years there (there is a 16 month gap between the last letter from Diarbekir and first from Beirut), the Wards wrote 21 letters, and had two children. Much of their efforts during this period revolved around Edwin’s oversight of the construction of a hospital, however the letters touch on a range of subjects, including helping Edwin deliver a baby, and abortion among Turkish women.

From July 1912 to July 1914, the Wards worked in Beirut and the near-by city of Aleih. Edwin worked long hours at a hospital — Charlotte discusses how he is gone for days at a time — but during this time, the couple found enough time together to have a third child. In her letters, Charlotte mentions attending the funeral of Samuel Jessup, one of the last survivors of the first generation of American missionaries in the Levant; taking in a baseball game that Americans in Beirut played on July 4; and British warships off the coast of Beirut.

The remainder of the collection consists of 13 letters from Margaret (probably Margaret Hall), Gertrude (Blanchard?), and Ruth P. (Ward) Beach, missionaries in China. Written from Ponsang Women’s College, Foochow [Fouzhou], Shanghai, and Tientsin [Tianjin], China, 1911-1914, the letters are primarily personal in nature, discussing family and friends within the missionary community, but provide some perspective on life in China after the Revolution of 1911.

Kaisando Temple, Nagasaki

A pioneer in war photography and the photography of Japan, Felice Beato is believed to have been born between 1825 and 1830 on the Greek Island of Corfu, then a British protectorate. Although little certain can be said about his formal training or early career, Beato is known to have begun work as a photographer as early as 1851, when he traveled to Constantinople with his brother Antonio to work for James Robertson, an experienced photographer who would later become their brother-in-law. By 1853, the Beatos and Robertson had formed a partnership, taking touristic images of famous sites throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Palestine.

In 1855, Robertson and Beato shifted course and lit out to document the Crimean War battlefields at Balaklava, following immediately on the heels of the photographer Roger Fenton. Three years later, Beato ventured even further afield, heading to Calcutta and northern India to take photographs of the devastation following the Lucknow Revolt, and producing a series of graphic images that are sometimes considered to include the earliest depictions of war dead.

After spending an undetermined period of time in England, Beato left for Japan prior to 1863, and although he was not the first photographer there, his images are among the best known of the late Edo period. Once settled in Yokohama, he opened a photographic and art studio with the English journalist and illustrator Charles Wirgman, producing a stunning array of views, portraits, ethnographic images, and genre scenes over almost a decade and a half. He traveled throughout Honshu and other Japanese islands, becoming the official photographer on the military expedition to Shimonoseki in September 1864, and producing a widely reproduced series of views of Nagasaki and its surroundings shortly thereafter.

After a fire destroyed all of his negatives in 1866, Beato resumed work with great energy. In 1871, he accompanied a United States naval expedition to Korea, sometimes referred to as the first Korean War, again as official photographer. Just as important as his documentary work, however, Beato is reputed to have helped train the first generation of Japanese photographers, including Kusakabe Kimbei, as well as the noted German photograph Raimund von Stillfried. Beato remained in Yokohama until 1877 at which time he sold his negatives and studio to Stillfried’s firm.

Later in life, Beato photographed in Africa and southeast Asia, but he appears to have stopped photographing after 1899. He died in 1908.

The Beato Collection includes ten images taken by Felice Beato in Japan between 1863 and 1871, including his famous view of Daibutsu, the Great Buddha at Kotokuin Temple, Kamakura; his view of one of the residences of the Shimabara clan; two very scarce views of a farmhouse and agricultural laborers, probably taken along the Tokaido Road; two views of Yokohama; and a fine view of a naval fleet at Nagasaki.