Ottoman History Podcast

E204 | In the decades following the Armenian genocide, communities of the diaspora began to document the life of Ottoman Armenians in the towns and villages of Anatolia and publish their material in memory books aimed at preserving and transmitting Armenian histories for posterity. Largely composed in Armenian and languages of the diaspora, these books have circulated in small circles for decades...

E203 | The history of the modern world is one of overlapping displacements that have severed ties not only between people and their ancestral homes but also their histories. The writing of village history among displaced communities such as Ashkenazi Jews and Ottoman Armenians has emerged as a means of preserving that history for future generations in the diaspora. In this episode, Rochelle Davis...

E202 | Bath houses or hamams were mainstays of the Ottoman city. But as semi-public spaces where people could mix and implicitly transgressed certain boundaries regarding nudity, they were also spaces that produced anxiety and calls for regulation. In this episode, Elyse Semerdjian discusses how in a certain time and place of eighteenth century Aleppo, the issue of Muslim and Christian women bathi...

E201 | The production of motion pictures began in the 1890s, and before long, films were being screened throughout the world, including in Ottoman cities. How did Ottoman audiences receive the advent of film? What was the role of the state in promoting or limiting the spread of motion pictures? What were the contents of the earliest films shown and produced in the Ottoman Empire? In this episode,...

E200 | "Sectarianism" is a a slippery term, now used to describe everything from Saudi Arabian foreign policy to the daily functioning of Lebanese politics to the rhetoric of the Islamic State. In this episode, historian Ussama Makdisi takes on the history of both the term "sectarian" and the kinds of communal political divides it is often used to describe in the late Ottoman Empire and the 20th c...

E199 | Within the historiography, major shifts and developments in schools of thought and legal interpretation have dominated the narrative of how Islamic law has spread and transformed across time. However, as our guest Guy Burak argues in his new monograph, The Second Formation of Islamic Law, structural changes in the relationship between state, society, and law are also an important part of th...

E198 | The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 brought an Austro-Hungarian occupation to many parts of the Balkans such as Bosnia that had lived under Ottoman rule for centuries. While this was certainly a historical rupture, as Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular emphasizes, this period also witnessed some important continuities with the Ottoman past. In this episode, we discuss Dr. Amzi-Erdoğdular's ongoing book project...

E197 | This podcast explores murky boundaries in two senses. The first has to do with Anglo-Ottoman commerce and diplomacy in the early modern period. Like the more well-known case of the the British East India Company in South Asia, British diplomatic representation in Constantinople was also controlled by a corporate entity. Known as the Levant Company, the institution ensured that from the late...

E196 | During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, scientists and physicians the world over began to think of sex as something that could be studied and understood through rational methods. In places like Germany, these sexologists were associated with progressive political movements that combated stigmatization of homosexuality and contraception and broke taboos regarding issues such...

E195 | Visit http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2015/08/ottoman-empire-photography-edhem-eldem.html for images associated with the podcast. Photography came to the Ottoman Empire almost immediately after its invention in 1839. Some of the major figures and studios involved in Ottoman photography have been identified, and certain stylistic aspects of images produced in and of the Ottoman Empire s...

E194 | At the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish-speaking Greek intellectuals of Cappadocian origin found themselves between mutually opposed Turkish and Greek nationalist ideologies. Their unique cultural background and their belief in the promises of the Young Turk Revolution allowed them to develop an alternative brand of Greek identity, one that combined cultural Hellenism with political l...

E193 | From Baghdad to Cairo to Edirne, hospitals were major and integral components of medieval and early modern Islamic cities. But what role did they play in these cities and their societies? Were they sites for the development of medical knowledge? In this podcast, Professor Ahmed Ragab examines the history and significance of hospitals in Mamluk Egypt and Syria. He argues that we must view th...

E192 | Bathhouses or hamams are a well-known feature of the Ottoman city typically associated with leisure. However, as our guest Nina Ergin explains, the history of hamams also provides a window onto many socioeconomic and political issues in the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, we discuss her research regarding the hamams of Istanbul during the mid-eighteenth century, what they tell us about the...

E191 | Within nationalist understandings of Turkish identity, connections between Central Asia and the people of modern Turkey are often conceived of in terms of ancient genealogy of Turkic peoples. But as our guest in this episode of Ottoman History Podcast Lale Can illustrates, much more recent bonds forged not by ethnic but rather spiritual affinity during the Ottoman period point to enduring c...

E190 | For more than a century, waves of Armenian migrants have come to the United States variously seeking economic opportunity or fleeing political violence and persecution. In this episode, Susanna Ferguson sits down with David Gutman to discuss his research on the origins of Armenian migration to the United States and elsewhere during the late Ottoman period, and they explore how shifts in mig...

E189 | Countries, much like companies, must seek to present a certain image to the outside world in order to achieve certain political and economic goals. As our guest in this episode, Aslı Iğsız, demonstrates, this self-presentation can take the form of full-fledged marketing campaigns. In this episode, we explore the marketing policies and strategies adopted in Turkey and the broader Middle East...

E188 | The association of Algeria with sex figured prominently in the artwork and literature that was critiqued so famously by Edward Said in Orientalism. In this episode, Dr. Aurelie Perrier discusses the practical backdrop of this argument beyond the level of discourse by exploring illicit sex in 19th century Algeria under both Ottoman and French rule. Beginning with the fluid boundaries of Otto...

E187 | The songs and melodies of the Turkey's Alevi communities derive from a long history of song-making in Anatolia that is embedded in local geographies and indelibly tied to notions of worship and belonging. So what happens when, through migration and media, that music enters an entirely new context? In this episode, we sit down with ethnomusicologist and musician Ozan Aksoy to discuss to his...

E186 | Students of Ottoman history might tend to think of the Medieval Period in Anatolia as a precursor to the Ottoman, in other words, reading the region's medieval past through the teleological lens of the Ottoman rise. However, recent scholarship on Medieval Anatolia, especially the Seljuk and Mongol periods, has moved towards a different approach that argues for the study of this complex geog...

E185 | Pan-Turkism rose to prominence as a political ideology during the early twentieth century, heavily influenced by Muslim intellectuals that traveled between the Russian and Ottoman spheres. For many of these figures such as Yusuf Akçura, Ismail Gasprinski, and Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Pan-Turkism became the political movement that defined their legacies. However, as James Meyer explains in his new mon...

E184 | Hadi Hosainy ile 17. yüzyıl İstanbulu'nda kadın mülkiyet hakları üzerine konuştuğumuz bu podcastımızda kadınların hukuki yollara başvurarak nasıl kendilerini koruduklarına ve Osmanlı toplumunun şeri hukukun kadını dezavantajlı bir konuma iten kurallarının nasıl arkasından dolandığına değindik. Toplumsal cinsiyetin hukukun işleyişine etkilerini tartıştık. Hadi Hosainy University of Texas at...

E183 | The story of the twelfth-century scholar Umaya b. `Abd al-`Aziz Abu al-Salt al-Dani al-Ishbili starts in al-Andalus but moves eastward, to Fatimid Cairo and Zirid Tunisia. His movement across the Mediterranean illustrates a west-east transmission of knowledge and intellectual culture. A prolific scholar trained in diverse fields, Abu al-Salt's story traces scholarly links between multiple m...

E182 | In this episode, Beth Baron discusses the historical context of the Muslim Brotherhood's rise during the interwar period and how the organization's activities and goals were shaped by the actions of European missionaries in Egypt. More at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2015/01/history-muslim-brotherhood-egypt.html Beth Baron is Professor of History at City University of New York (CUN...

E181 | The legal and social environments surrounding slavery and manumission during the early modern period varied from place to place and profession to profession. In this episode, Nur Sobers-Khan presents her exciting research on the lives of a particular population of slaves in Ottoman Galata during the late sixteenth century, how they were classified and documented under Ottoman law, and the t...

E180 | How have the immense transformations of the nineteenth century impacted Egyptian state and society? Our guest Dr. Khaled Fahmy has devoted much of his work to the study of that very question in the realms of military, medicine, and in this episode, law, which is the subject of his forthcoming book. In this episode, we explore the emergence to of new legal institutions under Mehmed Ali's gov...