The imagery used in these fundraising campaigns is chilling. A 1917 campaign for $30 million paired illustrations of women and children with pleas for help. On one poster, Americans were reminded to think of "The Child at Your Door: 400,000 Orphans Starving and No State Aid Available."

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"Give or We Perish," another warned.

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Posters also used patriotic imagery to suggest America's responsibility to protect children under threat abroad.

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Archival photographs show the organization's efforts to relocate orphans. "Like little French soldiers," one reads. "Some of the children being moved from Turkey to Greece to the American Near East Relief. In Constantinople, the children were outfitted in light blue uniforms which made them look like miniature French soldiers."

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President Wilson strongly supported the organization's efforts to provide relief to the region's refugees, and at the conclusion of World War I, he argued on behalf of American intervention in the Armenian case. "Have you thought of the sufferings of Armenia?" he said in June of 1919. "You poured your money out to help succor the Armenians after they suffered; now set your strength so that they shall never suffer again."

Wilson's solution was an American mandate for Armenian, meaning the United States would be responsible for helping the new country establish a government and deal with the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of refugees. According to a New York Times report, the U.S. would have also had to provide two to four military regiments "to exert a steadying effect upon the native population," as well as guidance for creating infrastructure for transportation and sanitation. This mandate failed to get support in Congress, however, and the United States ultimately decided not to participate at all in partitioning the former Ottoman Empire into new countries.

Of course, it is impossible to equate a century-old genocide that was tied up in an international war with today's situation in Syria. It's also worth noting how national borders have changed throughout the complicated history that followed; modern-day Armenia lies to the north and east of Syria, and the two countries are separated by Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.

Still, this echo of the past is uncanny -- and very, very sad.

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