Ottoman History Podcast

Episode 440 with Nazan Maksudyan hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Children are often imagined as victims of war or passive bystanders. But in this episode, Nazan Maksudyan is back on the program to talk about how the First World War looked through the eyes of Ottoman children and their lives as historical actors during and after the conflict. We explore the experience of child workers and the many situations faced by children throughout the war, and we also explore the themes of survival and resilience as expressed in the experience of children, especially Ottoman Armenians. We also discuss the challenges of writing amid a tumultuous period for Turkey and an experience of exile.  « Click for More »

Episode 434 with Sarah Abrevaya Stein hosted by Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein speaks to us about the journey of one Jewish family from Ottoman Salonica in the late nineteenth century to Manchester, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and beyond during the twentieth century. In her new book Family Papers, she reveals the poignant continuities and changes that accompanied the Sephardic family's movement from an imperial world into a national one through stories of displacement and genocide, endurance and survival. She also discusses the cache of family papers that allowed her to provide this uniquely intimate vantage on large-scale historical transformations. « Click for More »

Episode 429 with Yiğit Akın hosted by Chris Gratien and Susanna Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud World War I brought unprecedented destruction to the Ottoman Empire and resulted in its fall of as a political entity, but war also produced new politics. In this podcast, Yiğit Akın is back to talk about his book When the War Came Home and how years of war transformed the Ottoman Empire. We discuss how the experience of the 1912-13 Balkan Wars reshaped Ottoman officials' understanding of modern warfare and informed decisions taken during the First World War. We also discuss the social history of the war for ordinary Ottoman citizens and consider how the particularities of the Ottoman case reveal new insights about WWI and its legacy. « Click for More »

Episode 427 with Yonca Köksal hosted by Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud How do social networks determine the results of government reform? In this episode we examine this quesiton during the Tanzimat reform era (1839-76) with historical sociologist Yonca Köksal. Her research focuses on the differing outcomes of the Tanzimat in two core provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Ankara and Edirne. Applying social network analysis to imperial correspondence and provincial petitions, Köksal shows how differing network structures could lead to different outcomes in government reforms, empowering local dynasties in some areas and giving rise to cross-confessional coalitions in others. « Click for More »

Episode 425 with Alp Eren Topal hosted by Susanna Ferguson and Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, Alp Eren Topal traces the history of medical metaphors for describing and diagnosing state and society in Ottoman political thought. From the balancing of humors prescribed by Galenic medicine to the lifespan of the state described by Ibn Khaldun and the germ theory of nineteenth-century biomedicine, we explore some of the ways people thought about the state and its health or illness in the early-modern and modern Mediterranean world. How did these metaphors and images change over time, and how did they inform the policies of the Empire and its rulers? « Click for More »

Episode 423 with Matthew Ellis hosted by Zoe Griffith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud When the Ottoman state granted the province of Egypt to the family of Mehmed Ali Pasha in the 19th century, neither party much cared where Egypt's western border lay. As Matthew Ellis argues in his book, Desert Borderland, sovereignty in the eastern Sahara, the expanse of desert spanning Egypt and Ottoman Libya, was not simply imposed by modern, centralized states. In this episode, we discuss the various groups and actors who complicated the question of borders and political identity in one of the least studied corners of Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. Conflict and negotiations between oasis dwellers, Ottoman bureaucrats, Egyptian royals, the Sanusi order, and colonial officials kept this territory unbounded until the border was ultimately drawn in 1925. How did modern states attempt to practice sovereignty and claim territory in this vast desert borderland? And how did local populations resist and assist in state-making in the decades surrounding the First World War? « Click for More »

Gülhan Balsoy and Tuba Demirci discuss pregnancy and childbirth in the Late Ottoman Empire. They explore the establishment of a school of midwifery, the political issues surrounding reproduction, midwifery practices and regulations, the impact of the printing press, and women's agency in childbirth and abortion.

Episode 420 with Will Smiley hosted by Zoe Griffith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud How did an Irish-born Russian nobleman serving in the Russian army end up an Ottoman slave and valet to an Ottoman-Albanian officer? And what possibilities existed for his eventual release? In this episode, Will Smiley traces the history of Ottoman laws of captivity and ransom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how older practices of enslavement and ransom transformed into a new legal category of "prisoner of war" and shedding light on a path to modern international law that lies outside of Europe. « Click for More »

Episode 416 with Sooyong Kim hosted by Nir Shafir and Elisabetta Benigni Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud What made for a good poet in the Ottoman Empire? It is a question that far too few historians tackle because Ottoman poetry, especially that of the court, is often regarded as inaccessible. In this podcast, Sooyong Kim brings to life the social world of Ottoman poets, focusing in particular on Zati, a poet plying his trade in the imperial court in the first half of the sixteenth century. We speak about how poets succeeded and failed and why Zati's successors erased him from the canon of good poetry. « Click for More »

Episode 412 with Ian Nagoski hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of people from the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman states emigrated to the U.S. Among them were musicians, singers, and artists who catered to the new diaspora communities that emerged in cities like New York and Boston. During the early 20th century, with the emergence of a commercial recording industry in the United States, these artists appeared on 78 rpm records that circulated within the diaspora communities of the former Ottoman Empire in the United States and beyond, singing in languages such as Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish, and Ladino. Their music included folks songs from their homelands and new compositions about life and love in the diaspora. In this episode, Ian Nagoski of Canary Records joins the podcast to showcase some of these old recordings, which he has located and digitized over the years, and we discuss some of the remarkable life stories of these largely forgotten artists in American music history. « Click for More »