Gideon's Band: America and the Middle East since 1945

The people stared at us everywhere, and we stared at them. We generally made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with them, because we bore down on them with America's greatness until we crushed them….
If ever those children of Israel in Palestine forget when Gideon's Band went through there from America, they ought to be cursed once more and finished. It was the rarest spectacle that ever astounded mortal eyes, perhaps.
—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
On a rainy Saturday in June 1867, Mark Twain scurried down Wall Street and boarded the S.S. Quaker City , a first-class steamer bound for the Holy Land, where he would witness one of America's earliest and best publicized encounters with the Middle East. Expecting to find a blend of Old World splendor and Christian asceticism in a setting as familiar as the nearest Bible, Twain's fellow travelers—self-styled pilgrims who hailed from Boston, St. Louis, and points west—stumbled instead into terra incognita. Appalled by scenes of oriental squalor, harried by constant demands for baksheesh, and astonished by how little nineteenth-century Arabs and Jews resembled idealized biblical figures, Twain's innocents abroad scrambled back aboard the Quaker City and steamed home, leaving the Middle East to the handful of American missionaries and merchants for whom the exotic region remained a life's work.