Part of a generation that was admonished in its youth to "remember the starving Armenians," Peterson traveled to Armenia in 1997 as a Peace Corps volunteer and was moved by the country’s troubled history. After research, he edited a collection of essays published by the University of Virginia Press under the title ""Starving Armenians": America and the Armenian Genocide 1915-1930 and After" (2004), which explores the American response to the violence against and dispersion of the Armenian people during and after World War I, when more than 1.5 million of the country's minority population died. He begins with the initial reports to President Woodrow Wilson from Henry Morgenthau, Sr., his ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Peterson also covers the contemporary period and the continuing campaign by ethnic Armenians and others to convince the U.S. government to officially recognize the actions as genocide, which Turkey has denied.