sentence-transformers/squad huggingface dataset:
Passage: "Near East" remained popular in diplomatic, trade and journalistic circles, but a variation soon developed among the scholars and the men of the cloth and their associates: "the Nearer East," reverting to the classical and then more scholarly distinction of "nearer" and "farther." They undoubtedly saw a need to separate the Biblical lands from the terrain of the Ottoman Empire. The Christians saw the country as the land of the Old and New Testaments, where Christianity had developed. The scholars in the field of studies that eventually became Biblical archaeology attempted to define it on the basis of archaeology.

Question: What remained popular in diplomatic, trade and journalistic circles?

Question: What variation soon developed among the scholars and the men of the cloth and their associates?

Question: There was a need to separate what from the terrain of the Ottoman Empire?

Question: What did the Christians see the country as?

Question: How did the scholars attempt their definition?
Passage: For example, The London Review of 1861 (Telford and Barber, unsigned) in reviewing several works by Rawlinson, Layard and others, defined themselves as making:

Question: When was the London Review?

Question: Rawlinson, Layard and others were reviewed in what?

Question: Who wrote The London Review of 1861?
Passage: The regions in their inventory were Assyria, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Ethiopia, Caucasus, Libya, Anatolia and Abyssinia. Explicitly excluded is India. No mention is made of the Balkans.

Question: What region was explicitly excluded?

Question: What region has no mention?

Question: Assyria, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Ethiopia, Caucasus, Libya, Anatolia, and Abyssinia were all what?
Passage: Hogarth then proceeds to say where and why in some detail, but no more mention is made of the classics. His analysis is geopolitical. His map delineates the Nearer East with regular lines as though surveyed. They include Iran, the Balkans, but not the Danube lands, Egypt, but not the rest of North Africa. Except for the Balkans, the region matches the later Middle East. It differs from the Ottoman Empire of the times in including Greece and Iran. Hogarth gives no evidence of being familiar with the contemporaneous initial concept of the Middle East.

Question: What does Hogarth say in detail?

Question: Hogarth makes no mention of what?

Question: How is Hogarth's analysis?
Passage: In the last years of the 19th century the term "Near East" acquired considerable disrepute in eyes of the English-speaking public as did the Ottoman Empire itself. The cause of the onus was the Hamidian Massacres of Armenians because they were Christians, but it seemed to spill over into the protracted conflicts of the Balkans. For a time, "Near East" meant primarily the Balkans. Robert Hichens' book The Near East (1913) is subtitled Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople.

Question: When did the term "Near East" acquire considerable disrepute?

Question: The term "Near East" acquired considerable disrepute in whose eyes?

Question: What was the cause of the onus?

Question: What was the cause of the Hamidian Massacres of Armenians?

Question: When was Robert Hickens' book wrote?
Passage: The change is evident in the reports of influential British travellers to the Balkans. In 1894, Sir Henry Norman, 1st Baronet, a journalist, travelled to the Far East, afterwards writing a book called The Peoples and Politics of the Far East, which came out in 1895. By "Far East" he meant Siberia, China, Japan, Korea, Siam and Malaya. As the book was a big success, he was off to the Balkan states with his wife in 1896 to develop detail for a sequel, The People and Politics of the Near East, which Scribners planned to publish in 1897. Mrs. Norman, a writer herself, wrote glowing letters of the home and person of Mme. Zakki, "the wife of a Turkish cabinet minister," who, she said, was a cultivated woman living in a country home full of books. As for the natives of the Balkans, they were "a semi-civilized people."

Question: Reports from who made the change evident?

Question: Where did Sir Henry Norman travel in 1894

Question: What book did Sir Henry Norman write after traveling to the Far East?

Question: What year did Sir Henry Norman's book come out?
Passage: The book was never published. Instead the Normans whirled off to New York. Norman published the gist of his planned travel book curiously mixed with vituperation against the Ottoman Empire in an article in June, 1896, in Scribner's Magazine. The empire had descended from an enlightened civilization ruling over barbarians for their own good to something considerably less. The difference was the Hamidian Massacres, which were being conducted even as the couple traveled the Balkans. According to Norman now, the empire had been established by "the Moslem horde" from Asia, which was stopped by "intrepid Hungary." Furthermore, "Greece shook off the turbaned destroyer of her people" and so on. The Russians were suddenly liberators of oppressed Balkan states. Having portrayed the Armenians as revolutionaries in the name of freedom with the expectation of being rescued by the intervention of Christian Europe, he states "but her hope was vain." England had "turned her back." Norman concluded his exhortation with "In the Balkans one learns to hate the Turk." Norman made sure that Gladstone read the article. Prince Nicolas of Montenegro wrote a letter thanking him for his article.

Question: Where did the Normans go off to instead of publishing the book?

Question: When did Norman publish parts of his planned travel book?

Question: What magazine did Norman publish his work in?

Question: Who were liberators of oppressed Balkan states?

Question: Who did Norman say "turned her back"?
Passage: Throughout this article Norman uses "Near East" to mean the countries where "the eastern question" applied; that is, to all of the Balkans. The countries and regions mentioned are Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina (which was Moslem and needed, in his view, to be suppressed), Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Romania. The rest of the Ottoman domain is demoted to just "the east."

Question: What does Norman mean in the article when saying "Near East"?

Question: What is the rest of the Ottoman domain demoted to?

Question: "The East" refers to what?
Passage: If Norman was apparently attempting to change British policy, it was perhaps William Miller (1864–1945), journalist and expert on the Near East, who did the most in that direction. In essence, he signed the death warrant, so to speak, of the Age of Empires. The fall of the Ottoman Empire ultimately enmeshed all the others as well. In the Travel and Politics in the Near East, 1898, Miller claimed to have made four trips to the Balkans, 1894, 1896, 1897 and 1898, and to be, in essence, an expert on "the Near East," by which he primarily meant the Balkans. Apart from the fact that he attended Oxford and played Rugby not many biographical details have been promulgated. He was in effect (whatever his formal associations if any) a point man of British near eastern intelligence.

Question: What was William Miller's life span?

Question: What was William Miller an expert on?

Question: So to speak, what did William Miller do?

Question: Where did Miller attend school?
Passage: These were fighting words to be coming from a country that once insisted Europe needed Turkey and was willing to spill blood over it. For his authority Miller invokes the people, citing the "collective wisdom" of Europe, and introducing a concept to arise many times in the decades to follow under chilling circumstances:

Question: Miller's words were considered what?

Question: It was considered Europe needed what country?

Question: What was Miller citing?
Passage: If the British Empire was now going to side with the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire had no choice but to cultivate a relationship with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was supported by the German Empire. In a few years these alignments became the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance (already formed in 1882), which were in part a cause of World War I. By its end in 1918 three empires were gone, a fourth was about to fall to revolution, and two more, the British and French, were forced to yield in revolutions started under the aegis of their own ideologies.

Question: The Ottoman Empire had no choice but to develop their relationship with what country?

Question: Who supported the Austro-Hungarian Empire?

Question: Who did the British Empire side with?

Question: The formation of the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance partly caused what?

Question: By what year were three empires gone?
Passage: By 1916, when millions of Europeans were becoming casualties of imperial war in the trenches of eastern and western Europe over "the eastern question," Arnold J. Toynbee, Hegelesque historian of civilization at large, was becoming metaphysical about the Near East. Geography alone was not a sufficient explanation of the terms, he believed. If the Ottoman Empire had been a sick man, then:

Question: What year was Arnold J toynbee becoming metaphysical about the Near East?

Question: Who was the Hegelesque historian of civilization?

Question: Arnold J Toynbee believed what?
Passage: From the death of the Near East new nations were able to rise from the ashes, notably the Republic of Turkey. Paradoxically it now aligned itself with the west rather than with the east. Mustafa Kemal, its founder, a former Ottoman high-ranking officer, was insistent on this social revolution, which, among other changes, liberated women from the strait rules still in effect in most Arabic-speaking countries. The demise of the political Near East now left a gap where it had been, into which stepped the Middle East.

Question: What was able to rise from the death of the Near East?

Question: What notable nation was able to rise from the ashes of the Near East?

Question: How did the Republic of Turkey align themselves?

Question: Who was the founder of the Republic of Turkey?

Question: Who was a former Ottoman high-ranking officer?
Passage: The term middle east as a noun and adjective was common in the 19th century in nearly every context except diplomacy and archaeology. An uncountable number of places appear to have had their middle easts from gardens to regions, including the United States. The innovation of the term "Near East" to mean the holdings of the Ottoman Empire as early as the Crimean War had left a geographical gap. The East Indies, or "Far East," derived ultimately from Ptolemy's "India Beyond the Ganges." The Ottoman Empire ended at the eastern border of Iraq. "India This Side of the Ganges" and Iran had been omitted. The archaeologists counted Iran as "the Near East" because Old Persian cuneiform had been found there. This usage did not sit well with the diplomats; India was left in an equivocal state. They needed a regional term.

Question: When was the term middle east common as a noun and adjective?

Question: The middle east was not common in diplomacy and what other context?

Question: Where did the "Far East" derive from?

Question: Where did the Ottoman Empire end?

Question: Why did archaeologists count Iran as "The Near East"?
Passage: The use of the term Middle East as a region of international affairs apparently began in British and American diplomatic circles quite independently of each other over concern for the security of the same country: Iran, then known to the west as Persia. In 1900 Thomas Edward Gordon published an article, The Problem of the Middle East, which began:

Question: Where did the use of the term Middle East as a region of international affairs begin?

Question: What was Iran known as to the west?

Question: When did Thomas Edward Gordon publish "The Problem of the Middle East"?

Question: What article did Thomas Edward Gordon publish?

Question: The problem of the Middle East was published by who?
Passage: The threat that caused Gordon, diplomat and military officer, to publish the article was resumption of work on a railway from Russia to the Persian Gulf. Gordon, a published author, had not used the term previously, but he was to use it from then on.

Question: What threat caused Gordon to publish his article?

Question: Who was a diplomat and military officer?

Question: Who had not used the term middle east previously in publications?
Passage: A second strategic personality from American diplomatic and military circles, Alfred Thayer Mahan, concerned about the naval vulnerability of the trade routes in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, commented in 1902:

Question: Who was a member of American diplomatic and military circles?

Question: What was Alfred Thayer Mahan concerned about?

Question: When did Alfred Thayer Mahan comment on the trade routes?
Passage: Apparently the sailor did not connect with the soldier, as Mahan believed he was innovating the term Middle East. It was, however, already there to be seen.

Question: Who did not connect with the soldier?

Question: What did Mahan believe he was innovating?

Question: What had already been there to be seen?
Passage: Until the period following World War I the Near East and the Middle East coexisted, but they were not always seen as distinct. Bertram Lenox Simpson, a colonial officer killed eventually in China, uses the terms together in his 1910 book, The Conflict of Color, as "the Near and Middle East." The total super-region consisted of "India, Afghanistan, Persia, Arabistan, Asia Minor, and last, but not least, Egypt." Simpson (under his pen-name, Weale) explains that this entire region "is politically one region – in spite of the divisions into which it is academically divided." His own term revives "the Nearer East" as opposed to "the Far East."

Question: The Near East and the Middle East coexisted until what period?

Question: Who was the colonial officer killed in China?

Question: Who wrote the 1910 book 'The Conflict of Color'?

Question: What was Simpson's pen-name?
Passage: The basis of Simpson's unity is color and colonial subjection. His color chart recognizes a spectrum of black, brown and yellow, which at the time had been traditional since the late 19th century. Apart from these was "the great white race", which the moderate Simpson tones down to simply the white race. The great whites were appearing as late as the 1920s works of James Henry Breasted, which were taught as the gospel of ancient history throughout the entire first half of the 20th century. A red wavelength was mainly of interest in America. The eastern question was modified by Simpson to "The Problem of the Nearer East," which had nothing to do with the Ottomans but everything to do with British colonialism. Simpson wrote of the white man:

Question: What is the basis of Simpson's unity?

Question: The great whites were appearing as late as what time?

Question: In whose works were the great whites appearing?

Question: What was mainly of interest in America?
Passage: These regions were occupied by "the brown men," with the yellow in the Far East and the black in Africa. The color issue was not settled until Kenya became independent in 1963, ending the last vestige of the British Empire.

Question: These regions were occupied by who?

Question: Where where the yellow?

Question: Where were the black?

Question: When did Kenya become independent?

Question: The color issue was not settled until when?
Passage: This view reveals a somewhat less than altruistic Christian intent of the British Empire; however, it was paradoxical from the beginning, as Simpson and most other writers pointed out. The Ottomans were portrayed as the slavers, but even as the American and British fleets were striking at the Barbary pirates on behalf of freedom, their countries were promulgating a vigorous African slave trade of their own. Charles George Gordon is known as the saint of all British colonial officers. A dedicated Christian, he spent his time between assignments living among the poor and donating his salary on their behalf. He won Ottoman confidence as a junior officer in the Crimean War. In his later career he became a high official in the Ottoman Empire, working as Governor of Egypt for the Ottoman khedive for the purpose of conducting campaigns against slavers and slavery in Egypt and the Sudan.

Question: The Ottomans were portrayed as what?

Question: Who is known as the saint of all British colonial officers?

Question: What did Charles George Gordon spend his time between?

Question: When did he win Ottoman confidence?

Question: What did he become in his later career?
Passage: The term "Near and Middle East," held the stage for a few years before World War I. It proved to be less acceptable to a colonial point of view that saw the entire region as one. In 1916 Captain T.C. Fowle, 40th Pathans (troops of British India), wrote of a trip he had taken from Karachi to Syria just before the war. The book does not contain a single instance of "Near East." Instead, the entire region is considered "the Middle East." The formerly Near Eastern sections of his trip are now "Turkish" and not Ottoman.

Question: When did the term "Near and Middle East" hold stage?

Question: What proved to be less acceptable to a colonial point of view?

Question: When did Captain T.C. Fowle write of a trip he had taken from Karachi to Syria?

Question: Who were the 40th Pathans?

Question: In the book Fowle wrote, what is the entire region considered?
Passage: Subsequently with the disgrace of "Near East" in diplomatic and military circles, "Middle East" prevailed. However, "Near East" continues in some circles at the discretion of the defining agency or academic department. They are not generally considered distinct regions as they were at their original definition.

Question: What prevailed with the disgrace of "Near East"?

Question: What continues in some circles at the discretion of the defining agency or academic department?

Question: What term was disgraced in diplomatic and military circles?
Passage: Although racial and colonial definitions of the Middle East are no longer considered ideologically sound, the sentiment of unity persists. For much, but by no means all, of the Middle East, the predominance of Islam lends some unity, as does the transient accident of geographical continuity. Otherwise there is but little basis except for history and convention to lump together peoples of multiple, often unrelated languages, governments, loyalties and customs.

Question: What sentiment persists even though racial and colonial definitions of the Middle East are no longer ideologically sound?

Question: What definitions of the Middle East are no longer ideologically sound?

Question: What are racial and colonial definitions of the Middle East considered?
Passage: In the 20th century after decades of intense warfare and political turmoil terms such as "Near East", "Far East" and "Middle East" were relegated to the experts, especially in the new field of political science. The new wave of diplomats often came from those programs. Archaeology on the international scene, although very much of intellectual interest to the major universities, fell into the shadow of international relations. Their domain became the Ancient Near East, which could no longer be relied upon to be the Near East. The Ottoman Empire was gone, along with all the other empires of the 19th century, replaced with independent republics. Someone had to reconcile the present with the past. This duty was inherited by various specialized agencies that were formed to handle specific aspects of international relations, now so complex as to be beyond the scope and abilities of a diplomatic corps in the former sense. The ancient Near East is frozen in time. The living Near East is primarily what the agencies say it is. In most cases this single term is inadequate to describe the geographical range of their operations. The result is multiple definitions.

Question: When were terms such as "Near East", "Far East", and "Middle East" relegated to the experts?

Question: Where did the new wave of diplomats often come from?

Question: Where did archaeology on the international scene fall into?

Question: What replaced the fallen empires of the 19th century?
Passage: The United States is the chief remaining nation to assign official responsibilities to a region called the Near East. Within the government the State Department has been most influential in promulgating the Near Eastern regional system. The countries of the former empires of the 19th century have in general abandoned the term and the subdivision in favor of Middle East, North Africa and various forms of Asia. In many cases, such as France, no distinct regional substructures have been employed. Each country has its own French diplomatic apparatus, although regional terms, including Proche-Orient and Moyen-Orient, may be used in a descriptive sense. The most influential agencies in the United States still using Near East as a working concept are as follows.

Question: What is the chief remaining nation to assign official responsibilities to a region called the Near East?

Question: What has the state department been most influential in promulgating?

Question: Who has abandoned the term Near East?
Passage: The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, a division of the United States Department of State, is perhaps the most influential agency to still use the term Near East. Under the Secretary of State, it implements the official diplomacy of the United States, called also statecraft by Secretary Clinton. The name of the bureau is traditional and historic. There is, however, no distinct Middle East. All official Middle Eastern affairs are referred to this bureau.

Question: The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs is a division of what?

Question: What is perhaps the most influential agency to still use the term Near East?

Question: Secretary Clinton also calls the implementation of official diplomacy of the United States what?
Passage: Working closely in conjunction with the definition of the Near East provided by the State Department is the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies (NESA), an educational institution of the United States Department of Defense. It teaches courses and holds seminars and workshops for government officials and military officers who will work or are working within its region. As the name indicates, that region is a combination of State Department regions; however, NESA is careful to identify the State Department region. As its Near East is not different from the State Department's it does not appear in the table. Its name, however, is not entirely accurate. For example, its region includes Mauritania, a member of the State Department's Africa (Sub-Sahara).

Question: Who works closely with the definition of the Near East?

Question: What is NESA?

Question: What does NESA Teach?
Passage: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) is a non-profit organization for research and advice on Middle Eastern policy. It regards its target countries as the Middle East but adopts the convention of calling them the Near East to be in conformance with the practices of the State Department. Its views are independent. The WINEP bundles the countries of Northwest Africa together under "North Africa." Details can be found in Policy Focus #65.

Question: What is WINEP?

Question: What is WINEPS target countries as?

Question: How does WINEP bundle the countries of Northwest Africa?