The origins of Armenian American public life: Christopher Oscanyan’s 1835 lectures

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the Armenian Weekly’s March 2026 special magazine issue, “America at 250: An Armenian American Retrospective,” guest edited by former Weekly editor Dr. Khatchig Mouradian and dedicated to the 250th anniversary of Declaration of Independence and the history of Armenian American life.

In the fall of 1834, a young Armenian Ottoman named Khachadour “Christopher” Oscanyan arrived in New York City to attend the new University of the City of New York, now New York University. He was a precocious teenager who had caught the attention of the American Protestant missionaries in Constantinople, his home city. Through some combination of tenacity and good fortune, Oscanyan was able to make the voyage to the “New World” and commence a career that would one day land him in conversation with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, P.T. Barnum and Abraham Lincoln. But those are stories for another day. Here, we transmit an origin story: the origin not just of Christopher Oscanyan’s American career, but of Armenian American public life itself.