| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
his essay discusses the establishment of Alborz College by American Presbyterian missionaries. Alborz's early years, before its 1940 nationalization by Iran, were shaped by the vision of its first president, Samuel Jordan, a liberal, athletic, pragmatic Christian reformer who led by example, a practitioner of what we now call "social work" and an encourager of female empowerment. Alborz and the Presbyterian mission which gave it birth grew in the context of American social history, including the religious awakening of the early nineteenth century, American doctrines of freedom and universal education, as well as the contradictory impulses of ethnocentricity and ecumenicism. The essay is based on private and governmental archival sources and the experience of the author as a high school student in Tehran.
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