AUB Press

​​Eighteen-year-old Gladys Mouro left her home in New Hampshire for the American University of Beirut, where she soon became a first-rate registered nurse. But in her pursuit of adventure, Lebanon gave her more than she had ever bargained for. Less than a year after her arrival, Lebanon's civil conflict erupted and swept her into fifteen years of dealing with the tragic human consequences of war in an understaffed and unprotected hospital. This book is a personal record of living and working in a war-torn land; it is also a story of the noble survival of an institution – the American University of Beirut Medical Center and the courageous people who, against all odds, kept it alive and functioning throughout the Lebanese Civil War.

​​​This is the story of the Lewis Affair at the American University of Beirut (then the Syrian Protestant College). When Professor Edwin Lewis mentioned Charles Darwin in the course of a commencement address, there were drastic ramifications, including faculty resignations, student suspensions, the first student protest in the Arab World, a subsequent drop in student enrollment, and the imposition of a Declaration of Principles on AUB faculty members. It represents a momentous event in the history of the American University of Beirut, and its reverberations were felt in intellectual circles throughout the Arab world. A foreword by former AUB president John Waterbury outlines how the issues underlying the Lewis Affair, including the controversy generated by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the struggle between conservative and liberal elements of academia, and the question of academic freedom, remain pertinent to this day.

​In May 1873, Mrs. Abby Bliss and her four children left Beirut and returned to Amherst, Massachusetts for reasons of health and the children's education. This book contains letters written to them between 1873 and 1874 by Abby's husband, Daniel Bliss, the first president of the Syrian Protestant College, later the American University of Beirut. Written in diary form just seven years after the founding of the College, the letters reveal the excitement of the almost completed construction of College Hall, the frustrations and achievements of their fourteen months of separation, and fascinating information about daily life and the politics of the time. They show Daniel Bliss as a loving family man missing his wife and children while enthusiastically dedicated to the task of building the College.