Ottoman History Podcast

E150 | Much has been written about shifts in the concept of childhood and the structure of families, particularly for the period following industrialization. However, seldom do the voices and experiences of children find their way into historical narratives. In this podcast, Nazan Maksudyan offers some insights about how to approach the history of children and childhood and discusses the lives of...

E148 | The history of Anatolia's Alevi or Kizilbash community has long been written by outsiders who have variously portrayed them as mysterious, heretical, heterodox, or uncivilized. Alevism has been often juxtaposed with the high religion would-be orthodox Sunni practice. This historical understanding of Alevis has continued to influence the way these communities are represented in the present....

E070 | Ottoman life was deeply embedded in the countryside and rural production, and thus, issues of irrigation and ecology surrounding the production of staple food crops ranked high on the list of imperial concerns. In this episode, Alan Mikhail explains the ecological history of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its breadbasket in Egypt, and explores other issues related to the na...

E064 | Dreams are an essential part of the human experience but are attributed different significance in various times and places. For many Ottomans, dreams were a forum for the revelation of hidden or unseen knowledge, and dream narratives as well as their interpretations found their way into many Ottoman texts. In this podcast, Aslı Niyazioğlu explains the role of dreams within Ottoman society,...

E071 | While almost all of the well-known authors of the Ottoman period are men, women also participated in Ottoman intellectual circles as authors and artists. In this podcast, Didem Havlioğlu describes the world of early modern Ottoman intellectuals and discusses how we can study the cultural of production of women within this context. - See more at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2012/09/...

E098 | The image of prostitution as humanity's "oldest profession" often obscures the fact that this phenomenon has carried different social meaning and economic value across time and space. In this episode, Dr. Gary Leiser explores social understandings of prostitution in the Eastern Mediterranean between various political and legal frameworks during the medieval period. - See more at: http://www...

E095 | Printing in Ottoman Turkish first emerged during the eighteenth century. Yet, even when print had arrived in full force by the middle of the nineteenth century, it remained forbidden to print the text most sought after by Ottoman readers: the Qur'an. In this episode, Brett Wilson discusses the rise of print and Qur'an printing in the Ottoman Empire as well as the emergence of Turkish transl...

E053 | Although it is not uncommon when reading about the Ottoman Empire to see it portrayed as a monolithic, rational state apparatus serving a purported state interest, factions with their own interests and agendas played a major role in Ottoman decision-making. In this episode, Dr. Emrah Safa Gürkan explains the importance of disconglomerating state interests and examining factionalism when app...

E089 | Günümüzde tarihin nasıl algılandığı, yeniden üretildiği, sembolize ve politize edildiği tartışılırken, geçmiş toplumların kendi geçmişlerini nasıl algıladıkları sıklıkla gözden kaçmaktadır. Bu podcastımızda Yard. Doç. Dr. Tülün Değirmenci resimli el yazmalarındaki I. Selim (1512-1520) imgesi üzerinden 17. yüzyıl Osmanlı şehirlilerinin tarih algısını inceliyor. Siyaset, popüler algı ve tarih...

E087 | Genelde hükümdar merkezli bir siyasi tarih anlayışı geliştiren Osmanlı tarihyazımı ironik bir şekilde bu hükümdarlar üzerine kapsamlı biyografiler üretememiştir. Bu podcastimizde Collège de France ve Sorbonne Üniversitesi’nden Dr. Güneş Işıksel ile II. Selim’in şehzadelik dönemine odaklanarak üzerine pek fazla bilgimizin olmadığı bir alan olan Osmanlı diplomasisini inceledik. Modern Osmanlı...

E073 | Birçok araştırmacı zengin ve köklü bir geleneğe sahip olan İslam hat sanatının ortaya çıkışını İslam dininin insan suretinin resmedilmesini yasaklaması ile açıklamaya çalışmıştır. Ancak, bu yorum İslam dünyasının kültür ve tarihi hakkında bir takım yanlış çıkarsamalara olduğu kadar, Batının tarihi ve kültürel gelişimini normatif olarak kabul eden modası geçmiş bir tarihsel metodolojiye de d...

E048 | The early modern era was a period of tremendous fluidity in terms of borders of identities. In this podcast, we discuss the life and times of Sefer Muratowicz, an Armenian merchant born in Ottoman Anatolia during the late sixteenth century who settled in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and became an envoy to the Safavid Shah in Persia through his role as a merchant. Sefer left an account...

E093 | Osmanlı tarihçileri uzun bir zamandır 17. yüzyılın krizlerle dolu ilk yarısında klasik Osmanlı kurumlarının geçirdiği büyük dönüşümlere odaklanmaktadır. Bu podcastımızda Taylan Akyıldırım le Anadolu’yu tamamen etkisi altına alıp önemli siyasi, iktisadi ve toplumsal etkiler yaratan Celali İsyanları üzerine konuştuk. Küçük Buz Çağı, Fiyat Devrimi, Osmanlı gerilemesi, Askeri Devrim gibi paradi...

E072 | Türkçe yaptığımız ilk podcastimizde Kahraman Şakul ile Yeni Askeri Tarih üzerine konuşuyoruz. Aynı zamanda genel bir literatür değerlendirmesini de içeren bu podcastimizde, Yrd. Doç. Dr. Şakul bize Osmanlı tarihyazımında görece ihmal edilmiş bir alan olan Askeri Tarihin sadece savaş ve seferlerin tarihi olmadığını belirterek, verdiği çeşitli örneklerle bu tarihin sosyal, ekonomik ve kültüre...

E039 | For at least two centuries, Western countries have used international criminal, civil, and commercial law as a means of influencing the Ottoman and Turkish governments, leading some to speak of a phenomenon called legal imperialism, and while these efforts have impacted policies in Turkey, they have not always achieved their intended effect. In this episode, Chris Gratien discusses an inter...

E077 | The entity known today as the Ottoman Empire is often taken by historians as an exemplary model of an imperial state. Yet, until the nineteenth century, Ottomans had never referred to their state as an empire in their writings or bureaucratic records and diplomatic correspondences. In this podcast, Einar Wigen explores the curious absence of the term "empire" within the Ottoman vocabulary,...

E097 | Osmanlı toplumunun yaşamının hızla değiştiği bir dönem olan 19. yüzyılda sanat alanında da birçok yenilikler ortaya çıktı. Bu podcastın birinci bölümünde Doç. Dr. Melda Üner ile batılılaşma ve modernleşme paradigmaları çerçevesinde 19. yüzyıl Türk Edebiyatı’nda müzik ögesinin nasıl kullanıldığını konuşacağız. Dönemin bir çok edebi eseri üzerinde yoğunlaşarak Tanzimat ve Servet-i Fünûn gibi...

E136 | When are policies driven by prejudice, and when do policies give rise to prejudiced representations? In this episode, Nicholas Danforth explores depictions of Middle East politics in the Turkish satirical periodical Akbaba from the 1930s onward in an attempt to understand the politics of representation. - See more at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2013/12/arabs-turkish-eyes-politics....

E100 | Bu ezber bozan podcastımızda Prof. Dr. Cem Behar bizlere 16. yüzyılın ortalarında zuhur eden geleneksel Osmanlı/Türk musikisinin modernizasyon projesi çerçevesinde bir çok "icat edilmiş gelenek" ile nasıl inkıta'ya uğratıldığını anlatıyor. Günümüz Türk Sanat musikisi ile Osmanlı dönemindeki musikinin kompozisyon ve icraları arasındaki farklılıklar üzerinde durarak "gelenek"in yerini nasıl "...

E062 | Historians have used classical Ottoman texts to explore social issues such as sexuality, with compiled manuscripts from various literary genres often forming a data-mine for historical information. However, this type of selective reading has often distorted or obscured the original meaning and context of literary works. Sometimes, texts that appear erotic or sexual in nature such as gazel c...

E114 | During the interwar period, nationalist and socialist movements throughout the world looked to the peasant as both the source and object of state programs wherein establishing a link between the center and the provinces was a critical part of fostering the sense of nation devised by elite intellectuals. In Turkey, the ideas of Ziya Gökalp regarding the importance of the Anatolian villager i...

E081 | Osman Hamdi Bey is recognized today as the foremost artist of the late-Ottoman period. Yet, in his time, it was his unique access to the ancient past as the head of Istanbul's archaeology museum that drew the interest of his Western contemporaries. In this episode, Emily Neumeier retraces the story of a rare Osman Hamdi Bey painting (At the Mosque Door, 1890 - click for high res image) that...

E104 | Stories of insincere conversion under duress and secret Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire give the impression that many Christians lived in hiding from a Muslim majority. However, as Zeynep Türkyılmaz argues in this podcast, the phenomenon of Crypto-Christianity is really more complex, as diversity and heterogeneity among the Ottoman Empire's rural communities gave rise to "in-bet...

E124 Part 2 | While science was once understood by historians "on its own terms," i.e. as a rational means of arriving at objective truths about the natural world, over the past decades, historians of science have illustrated the numerous ways in which scientific production is rooted in social and material contexts. In part one of this two-part series on the history of science, Nir Shafir leads us...

E127 | Historians have come to understand the Enlightenment, a cultural movement emphasizing reason and individualism, as a phenomenon of increasingly early origins that pervaded early modern European intellectual circles. This begs the question: as one of Europe's largest polities of the period, was the Ottoman Empire also party to this intellectual trend. In this episode, Harun Küçük describes w...