Writing the history of missionary institutions was a common feature of Catholic (especially Jesuit) and Protestant (e.g. ABCFM) missions in the Islamic world. But how can we account for the intent to control historical writing, underlined by historians of these missions? Alongside their official, published histories, the Columbia University-based archives of the two American Protestant institutions of higher education in late Ottoman and Republican Istanbul, Robert College and Constantinople Woman’s College, present us with a host of manuscripts and typewritten narratives of the history of both colleges. The authors of these histories connect the history of both colleges with the history of the shift from the Ottoman Empire to Republican Turkey and of education in the country. Three dominant motives stood out in these narratives. One was influence, such as the colleges’ claim of being incubators of educational and civic transformation: American college education was assumed to have provided models of Ottoman, then Turkish citizenship. A second motive was conflict management. Inter-communal relations were taken to be primarily conflictual and to have caused the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Taking these relational patterns into account was strategic for the colleges to survive and thrive in a Republican, supposedly homogeneous, Turkey. One last motive was boosting the public space. Colleges aimed to norm and arbiter conflicts, inter-communal or else, while consolidating spaces of dialogue. Yet history was a contested field where rival political movements competed for legitimacy. Historical writing often worked to preclude public debate by entrenching oppostions formulated in historical terms. Against this trend, orienting historical narrative was a way for historians from both colleges of consolidating and regulating the public space. These hypotheses were not mutually exclusive, but they entailed diverging teleologies. Stories of the colleges’s influence tended to be stories of growing acceptance of the colleges and the pluralistic principles they stood for by the state. Stories of conflict management could be accompanied with a sense of the inevitability of persecution and primordial confrontation. Stories of colleges as fostering an opening of the public space often told stories of democratization through critical debate, but also through the development of informed debate nurtured by specialists. These diverging narratives stressed different periodizations. Examining periodizations and narrative constructions sheds light on how the Ottoman past was perceived within those institutions in Republican times. It also enables us to understand how both colleges understood their position within the Republican régime.