George Washburn (1833–1915) was the second President of Robert College, the first American missionary college in the Ottoman Empire and the Near East, and the first American college founded outside the United States. Rooted in the Bebek Seminary of 1840 and patterned on the best colleges of New England, Robert College opened its doors, independent of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, on the site of the Seminary at Bebek on the European shore of Istanbul in 1863. It moved to its campus at Rumelihisari, overlooking the Bosphorus, in 1869 where it remained until 1971, when it was transferred to its current location and merged with the American College for Girls at Arnavutköy. Entering the American mission work in the Ottoman Empire in 1858 as a local treasurer of the American Board, Washburn continued his career as a professor in Robert College starting from 1869. He became the President of the College in 1877. Serving as President for 26 years, Washburn’s memoir largely overlaps with the period of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909), when the rivalry between the fast-crumbling Ottoman Empire and the rapidly ascending American Empire was manifest. The memoir vividly describes major events and characters of Washburn’s long tenure, both in Istanbul and the College, and serves as an historical account of bilateral relations in the background as well as of Robert College. This volume includes a new introduction by Devrim Umit, Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of International Relations in the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Karabuk University in Karabuk, Turkey. She received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2008.