What role did American Protestant institutions play in paving the transition from empire to nation state in the late Ottoman period? Increasingly, scholars have turned their attention onto these foreign interlocutors which sometimes inspired and joined the fray of nationalist movements in the Ottoman Empire leading up to World War I. Using archival research conducted between the U.S., Albania, and Turkey, this paper considers the educational history of one such institution, the American College for Women (ACG), and the activism of three of its women alumnae: the Albanian sisters, Paraskevi and Sevastia Kyrias, and the Turkish Halide Edip. Projecting itself as a center of influence in the Near East, the ACG encouraged its students to utilize their broad education to “participate in the home, in the community, and in national life.” In the years leading up to the war, these activists became some of the leading lights in Albanian and Turkish thought that shaped the postwar fate of their respective countries. Specifically, I broach their activity in the World War I years, and their proposals for an American mandate over their respective countries at the Peace Conference in 1919. Their ideas proved unworkable, and remained in the minority view in both cases. Nevertheless, I conclude with the observation that American educational institutions, such as the ACG, became conduits of political change in the transition from empire to nation state through the very act of training activists who took leading roles in that process. Where such activists were women, American Protestant institutions also provided them with the training which eventually thrust them into the public sphere.