Oren interview, continued

Web Extra: Part two of Marvin Olasky's interview with author Michael Oren

Part two of Marvin Olasky's interview with Michael Oren, author of Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (Norton, 2007). Oren, born in New Jersey in 1955, is now is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Read Part I now ...

WORLD: You write that early 19th century Americans such as Elizabeth Cabot Kirkland were stunned when they visited the Middle East?

OREN: The wife of Harvard's former president, Elizabeth Cabot Kirkland toured the Middle East in the late 1830s and wrote vividly of her impressions. She was one of the thousands of Americans who, over the course of the nineteenth century, came to the Middle East not as soldiers or missionaries but as tourists in search of romance and adventure.