In our interview with the former American ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman, which appears in this issue, he noted, “the value of American Studies is that it helps people get a better, more nuanced, and textured understanding of the American reality.” We couldn’t agree more. Because of the way America dominates headlines around the world, not to mention popular culture, foreign observers are prone to make assumptions about the United States based on only the flimsiest of evidence. For the past twenty years the value of the American Studies Association of Turkey, and of this Journal, is that they have worked to enlighten Turkish opinion about the United States based on scholarly work addressing culture, literature, and art.