The Miss Stone Affair: America’s First Modern Hostage Crisis

On September 3, 1901, a Protestant missionary named Ellen Stone set out on horseback across the mountainous hinterlands of Balkan Macedonia and was ambushed by a band of armed revolutionaries.

In The Miss Stone Affair, Teresa Carpenter re-creates an event that captured the attention of the world and posed a dilemma for incoming president Theodore Roosevelt. Should he send in the Navy or not? And, if so, send it where? Drawing upon a wealth of contemporary correspondence and documents, Carpenter constructs a narrative that is suspenseful, harrowing, and at times even comical. It is a story for our time.