Ottoman History Podcast

E589 | Lafky entered the United States as a teenager on false pretenses, when her cousin presented her to immigration authorities as his legal wife. A decade later, when her real marriage devolved into a messy divorce, her husband used her prior illicit entry against her, reporting Lafky to immigration authorities and triggering a legal battle that lasted for years. Lafky's deportation file reveal...

E588 | What does canine life reveal about the human worlds of modern Istanbul? In this special collaboration with Keyman Podcast at Northwestern University, we sit down with Mine Yıldırım, curator of the exhibition "Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul," to discuss the intersecting histories of cruelty and compassion towards animals in Turkey's largest city from the late Ottoman period...

E587 | During the Cold War period, Turkish cinema flourished, as American films entered local theaters, television sets, and the studios of Yeşilçam. Yet as Jülide Etem argues in her new book, Film Diplomacy, the cinematic story of Turkey-US relations begins not with entertaining Hollywood movies that circled the globe but rather educational film productions that simultaneously furthered the inter...

E586 | What can a single, discarded scrap of paper reveal about life in Ottoman-era Cairo? In this episode, Jane Hathaway discusses her open-access book Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah. A genizah is a storeroom or repository where Jewish communities preserved worn-out texts and papers, especially those containing the name of God. Long famous for its medieval Jewish materials, the Cair...

E585 | Bu bölümde Ümit Kurt’un Aras Yayıncılık’tan çıkan kitabı Kanun ve Nizam Dairesinde: Soykırım Teknokratı Mustafa Reşat Mimaroğlu’nun İzinde Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Devlet Mekanizması temelinde 1915’in idari ve bürokratik boyutuna odaklanıyoruz. Mustafa Reşat Mimaroğlu örneğinde olduğu gibi “kanun ve nizam dairesinde” hareket eden bürokratlara odaklandığımız sohbetimizde, kolektif şiddet ola...

E584 | What is Islamic architecture? In this follow-up to our ten-part seires on The Making of the Islamic World, we explore that question with Prof. Abbey Stockstill, author of Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib. Our conversation centers on the imperial city of Marrakesh, which was shaped by two successive dynasties — the Almoravids and th...

E583 | Bu bölümde Dr. Görkem Akgöz’ün 2025 Hagley Prize in Business History ödülünü alan “In the Shadow of War and Empire Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey” başlıklı kitabı üzerine konuşuyoruz. Akgöz’ün “Türk Manchester”ı olarak bilinen Bakırköy Bez Fabrikası’nı Osmanlı döneminde kuruluşundan itibaren odağa alan araştırması devletçiliği yalnızca bir kalkınma...

E582 | What does it mean to be Turkish? In this episode, we examine that question with sociologist Barış Ünlü. In The Turkishness Contract, Ünlü studies the historical process by which Turkishness developed through a contractual relationship between the state and its citizens. In our conversation, we explore the late Ottoman roots of this process, as well as how the experiences of non-Turkish reli...

A bonus conversation with historian Elizabeth Varon, author of Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South and many other titles, hosted by Chris Gratien, Claudrena Harold, and the graduate students of HIST 7001 at University of Virginia. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/03/longstreet.html

E581 | After the US Civil War, some leaders of the defeated Confederacy followed unusual trajectories, perhaps none more so than James Longstreet, who joined the Republican party and became a proponent of Southern Reconstruction and for a brief period, the Minister Resident to the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, we talk to Elizabeth Varon, author of a new biography of Longstreet, about the rebel-...

E580 | How did Palestine become central to anti-imperial movements and thought in the global south? In this episode, Esmat Elhalaby asks how Arabs and South Asians contended with the “parting gifts of empire” in the long twentieth century, often by turning to Palestine. He talks about how Arab writers in conversation with India reinvented Orientalism as a critique of empire and reinterpreted the p...

E579 | The word "refugee" might conjure images of families devastated by war fleeing their homeland. But what happens when those who seek asylum abroad do not conform to that image? As Sophia Balakian argues in her new book Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship, the question is one that shapes the case of every refugee seeking a new home abroad in the United St...

E578 | While killing time at the Booksellers' Row in Westminster, historian and curator Gwendolyn Collaço stumbled on a collection of postcards from early 20th-century Egypt, some featuring the British burlesque artist Miss Kitty Lord. When she realized that the postcards were a set belonging to a single person — none other than Kitty Lord herself — the chance discovery became a research quest tha...

E577 | Bağdat, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu için coğrafi uzaklığına rağmen merkezî idarenin vazgeçilmez vilayetlerinden biriydi. Tanzimat’tan itibaren bu önem, yalnızca askerî güvenlik veya sınır politikalarıyla sınırlı kalmadı; idarî modernleşme, ekonomik düzenlemeler ve toplumsal kontrol mekanizmalarının uygulandığı başlıca laboratuvarlardan biri haline geldi. II. Meşrutiyet’in ilanı ise bu denemeleri...

E576 | The seventeenth century has often been characterized as a period of disorder and religious polemics in the Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, Nir Shafir takes us inside his new book, which argues that the polemics of the early modern Ottoman world were fueled in part by changes in communication, namely the rise of short pamphlets that circulated easily in handwritten copies. Pamphlets created...

Fahad Bishara - Voyage Stories: The Natural and Supernatural on the Deck of a Dhow by Ottoman History Podcast

Shireen Hamza - Transformation by Ottoman History Podcast

Liana Saif - Witches by Ottoman History Podcast

KD Thompson - The Swahili Coast by Ottoman History Podcast

Rebecca Hankins - Faith, Freedom, and Favors by Ottoman History Podcast

Mahmood Kooria - Piracy by Ottoman History Podcast

E575 | What could historians have to say about a fantasy novel? The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, published in 2023, follows an aging mother and captain on magical adventures across the twelfth-century Indian Ocean world with her crew. It has been read widely, hitting bestseller lists in the US and being translated into eight languages. In this episode, a group of historians discusses the novel w...

E574 | Bu bölümde, Nurçin İleri, Emine Öztaner ve Meltem Kocaman ile elektriğin Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e uzanan süreçte gündelik yaşamı ve toplumsal ilişkileri nasıl dönüştürdüğünü tartışıyoruz. İstanbul’un ilk aydınlatma girişimlerinden sanayi tesislerine, tramvay hatlarından ev içi teknolojilere uzanan örneklerle, teknolojik yeniliklerin yalnızca kent altyapılarını değil, aynı zamanda kentlileri...

E573 | Comparisons are everywhere in American discussions of Middle East politics. As our guest, Perin Gürel, argues in a new book, this cultural impulse has political roots in the Cold War period. In this episode, we explore the origins of comparitivism through the lens of America's evolving relationship with Turkey and Iran over the course of the 20th century, focusing on how gender and race sha...

E572 | In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled a remarkable ethnographic and scholarly account of Greek life under Ottoman rule in his seminal Turcograecia. Though he never left his home in Tübingen, Crusius spent decades corresponding with a far-flung network of intermediaries, including the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul. He annotated books an...