Ottoman History Podcast

E 407 | The genre of biography usually applies to people, but could a similar approach be applied to an object? Can a thing have a life of its own? In this episode, Heghnar Watenpaugh explores this question by tracing the long journey of the Zeytun Gospels, a famous illuminated manuscript considered to be a masterpiece of medieval Armenian art. Protected for centuries in a remote church in eastern...

E 406 | This episode explores the post-World War II travelogues of Bosnian journalist Hasan Ljubunčić, who went on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca after the Second World War. His narrative showcases the entanglements between religion and politics, Bosnian Muslims and their contemporaries in Turkey and the broader Muslim world, and socialism and Islamic modernism. In the immediate aftermath of the Sec...

E 405 | About a half-hour's drive from Abu Dhabi sits Masdar City, a clean technology and renewable energy business cluster and research institute. Founded in 2006, Masdar imagines a sustainable and business-savvy future where technology, ecology, and humanity co-exist and thrive, even in the oil-rich deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. In this episode we speak with Gökçe Günel, who spent over a yea...

E404 | By the time of the First World War, there were roughly 500,000 Lebanese and Syrians in the Americas. And as Stacy Fahrenthold argues in a new book entitled Between the Ottomans and the Entente, this diaspora played a critical role in the transformation of politics in Greater Syria over a period of incredible flux. In our conversation, we discuss how the diaspora embraced and sustained the r...

E403 |Many students of Middle Eastern history know that that some non-Muslims subjects of the Ottoman Empire became "proteges" of European states in the nineteenth century and thus acquired extraterritorial legal protections. While we know the institutional history of extraterritoriality, the individual motivations and histories of those who chose to become proteges is relatively unknown. In this...

E 402 | Does everybody have a childhood? What kinds of childhood experiences have defined the modern Middle East? In this episode, three scholars discuss the methodological excitements and challenges of studying the history of childhood and youth in the modern Middle East. They discuss the roles of institutions like the army, the medical mission, and the school; the rise of state and colonial powe...

E 401 | Since the early centuries of Islam, Muslims have put tremendous effort into knowing and verifying reports of what the Prophet Mohammad said and did, known as hadith. They have written books collecting hadith, and even longer books explaining what they mean and how they should inform Muslim life. However, these books emerged (and continue to emerge) from a vibrant oral culture of hadith com...

E 400 | In this episode, Nir Shafir talks about the problem of "fake minatures" of Islamic science: small paintings that look old, but are actually contemporary productions. As these images circulate in museums, on book covers, and on the internet, they tell us more about what we want "Islamic science" to be than what it actually was. That, Nir tells us, is a lost opportunity. See more at: https:/...

E 399 | How did the Ottomans react to European attitudes and depictions of their own lands? Pondering on the groundbreaking book 'Orientalism' by Edward Said forty years after its publication, our guest Zeynep Çelik discusses the ways in which urban, art, and architectural historians have grappled with representations of the Ottomans by Europeans and representations of Ottomans by Ottomans themsel...

E 398 | What forces have governed Turkey's economic growth over the past two centuries? In this episode we speak with Şevket Pamuk about development in Turkey since 1820. In the late Ottoman period, low barriers to trade, agrarian exports, and European financial control defined the limits of economic expansion, while the transition from Empire to Republic brought more inward-looking policies aimed...

E397 | What is "development?" What can we learn about this key concept of the 20th century world by looking at it through the history of modern Iraq? In this episode, Sara Pursley unpacks the history of "development" in many forms to show how ideas about what the future should look like have governed what's possible in the present and the ways that we can narrate the past. From the girls' schools...

E396 | In this special episode, novelist Orhan Pamuk and historian Nükhet Varlık discuss how to write about plague and epidemics in Ottoman history. Orhan Pamuk is a Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose works such as My Name is Red drew masterfully on the literature and art of early modern Ottoman society. In an ongoing project, Pamuk is turning his attention towards the Ottoman experience of plague...

E395 | Zones of autonomy and resistance make up the region historically called Kurdistan - areas that can include parts of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Armenia - depending on whom you ask. This region, whose territory spans the boundaries of nation-states created after the First World War, continues to host conflict between powerful states and their opponents. Who ruled these areas in the past,...

E394 | How do you conduct research on an archive you can’t talk about? This was the problem faced by our guest Olly Akkerman on her research trip to Gujarat when she went to work on the manuscript library of the Alawi Bohra community of Baroda. The sacred library was only accessible to the leaders of the Bohra community and its contents can’t be revealed publicly. In this podcast, Akkerman tells u...

E393 | In this episode from our friends at Trending Globally (https://soundcloud.com/watsoninstitute/sets/trending-globally), Sarah Baldwin talks with Elias Muhanna about an essay he wrote for the New Yorker in May 2018 in which he describes recent advances in translating pre-Islamic Arabic texts. The conversation focuses on the groundbreaking translations of Muhanna's friend and colleague Ahmad A...

E392 | Bu bölümde Stefo Benlisoy ile II. Meşrutiyet döneminde Osmanlı sosyalist ve işçi hareketinin oluşumunu ve gelişimini konuşup Osmanlı'daki sosyalist grupların faaliyetlerini, yayınlarını, ve geliştirdiği siyasal perspektifleri incelemenin Osmanlı-Türkiye tarihini ve tarih yazımını anlamak açısından nasıl alternatif kanallar açabileceğine değindik. Özel olarak da Mayıs 1909’dan başlayarak İst...

E391 | The use of stimulants, what we now refer to as recreational drugs (marijuana and hashish – esrar and haşiş), in the late Ottoman world constitutes a lens through which one can observe multiple aspects of both the history of the Ottoman Empire and its historiography in its broader sense. The life and social dynamics of those involved in drug consumption contributes to sketching a picture of...

E390 | In the years after the world war that ravaged the Ottoman Empire, Hassan left his native village in modern-day Lebanon to join his parents and siblings in the growing Midwest town of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. To do so, he had to sidestep the stringent immigration quotas newly implemented by the US. But years later, when the authorities learned that he entered and was living in the US illeg...

E389 | In the wake of the First World War, the League of Nations oversaw internationally-recognized projects of separation and transfer as the new borders of the Middle East were drawn under the influence of British and French imperial rule. In this episode, we speak to Laura Robson about her research for the book States of Separation, which studied how imperial rule under the mandate system in Ir...

A short interview with historian Linda Gordon about her book "The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition" (Liveright, 2017) Recorded in conjunction with our investigative series "Deporting Ottoman Americans" - http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/p/doa.html

E388 | Tangier is in the midst of a massive renovation and expansion -- a new ferry and cruise port, a duty-free zone, and the massive Tangier Med shipping facility all meant to make the city and Morocco into a critical juncture of the global flows of goods, people, services, and capital. Of course, Tangier’s proximity to Europe and position astride the Strait of Gibraltar has long provided it wit...

E387 | Antoine Köpe was never a prominent politician or public figure, but he was witness to extraordinary events. Born in late Ottoman Istanbul to French and Hungarian parents, Antoine was there to celebrate the 1908 Young Turk revolution, fight in the First World War, live under an Allied occupation, and experience the emergence of the national resistance and the establishment of the Republic of...

E386 | Turkey is a country that most Americans know little about, and yet the United States has played an extraordinary role in the making of modern Turkey. In this podcast, we explore this disparity of awareness and the role of the US in the history of the Middle East through the lens of an American journalist's slow realization of her own subjectivity and the myriad ways in which the US and Turk...

E384 | Toplumsal cinsiyet bakış açısının son birkaç on yılda Osmanlı tarih yazımına yaptığı müdahaleler, saray kadınlarının imar faaliyetlerinde üstlendiği rolün giderek daha çok araştırılmasına da vesile oldu. Muzaffer Özgüleş’i konuk ettiğimiz bu bölümde, Sultan IV. Mehmed’in hasekisi, Sultan II. Mustafa ve Sultan III. Ahmed’in validesi Gülnuş Emetullah Sultan’ın imar faaliyetlerini detaylandırı...

In this bonus conversation, film scholar Samhita Sunya previews a trio of blockbuster Middle Eastern comedies that will enjoy their official US theatrical premiers at the Virginia Film Festival. For more, visit http://virginiafilmfestival.org/film-guide/ “Letters of Love (LOL) From the Middle East to South Asia: A Film Series of Contemporary Genre Comedies in U.S. Theatrical Premieres” Description...