Under various historical circumstances, the Armenians were compelled to leave their native land and to migrate to different countries of the world, including the USA, for individual, educational, economic, political, cultural, religious and other purposes.
Historically reliable documents reveal that even at the beginning of the 17th century a few Armenians were among the first European settlers in North America (in 1618, the first Armenian, John Martin, set foot in the newly-formed American colony of Virginia and became a tobacco-dealer).
The main stream of Armenian emigrants to USA has started in the first half of the 19th century as a result of the illuminative activity developed by the American protestant missionaries in Ottoman Turkey (the migration of the Armenian youth to American higher and first-rate educational institutions began in 1834).
The emigration of Armenians to the US, which, at the beginning, was of a temporary character and was impelled by educational and economic reasons, was subsequently transformed into a mass exodus following the periodical massacres, slaughter and Genocide organized in Ottoman Turkey against the Armenians (1894-1896, 1909, 1915, 1920-1922); this mass emigration involved tens of thousands of Armenians of both sexes, of various ages and social groups deprived of the prospects of a safe economic, political, cultural and religious life.
The calamitous political situation created in Ottoman Turkey following the First World War and in Czarist Russia, as well as the loss of confidence in the Allied States destroyed in the soul of thousands of emigrants the sacred dream of returning to their Homeland and they definitively established in the New Land of their adoption.
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