During the summer of 1876 in the aftermath of what the Daily News first named the “Moslem Atrocities in Bulgaria” Sir Henry Elliot, her majesty’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent a telegram to the Foreign Office in London (The London Daily News, 1876, June 23 & July 8). On July 19 Elliot wrote therein, “The statements in the ‘Daily News’ have been taken principally from information furnished by the American missionaries” (Parliamentary Papers, 1876, July 19). Published soon thereafter, the role of the American missionaries in sourcing the Daily News and its reports of these “Bulgarian Atrocities” became a foregone conclusion in the popular memory of these notoriously violent events.1 Elliot’s assertion about the role of the missionaries has continued to dominate the Wes-tern historiographic tradition for the last 150 years.