Ottoman History Podcast

Episode 411 Produced and Narrated by Chris Gratien Episode Consultant: Devin Naar Series Consultant: Emily Pope-Obeda Script Editor: Sam Dolbee with additional contributions by Devi Mays, Claudrena Harold, Victoria Saker Woeste, Sam Negri, and Louis Negri Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Leo lived in New York City with his family. Born and educated in the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he was now part of the vibrant and richly-textured social fabric of America's largest metropolis as one one of the tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews who migrated to the US. Though he spoke four languages, Leo held jobs such as garbage collector and shoeshine during the Great Depression. Sometimes he couldn't find any work at all. But his woes were compounded when immigration authorities discovered he had entered the US using fraudulent documents. Yet Leo was not alone; his story was the story of many Jewish migrants throughout the world during the interwar era who saw the gates closing before them at every turn. Through Leo and his brush with deportation, we examine the history of the US as would-be refuge for Jews facing persecution elsewhere, highlight the indelible link between anti-immigrant policy and illicit migration, and explore transformations in the history of race in New York City through the history of Leo and his family. This episode is part of our investigative series Deporting Ottoman Americans. « Click for More »

Episode 407 with Heghnar Watenpaugh hosted by Emily Neumeier Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud 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 Anatolia, the sacred book traveled with the waves of people displaced by the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the chaos of the First World War, it was divided in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty Museum in LA. In this interview, we discuss how the Zeytun Gospels could be understood as a "survivor object," contributing to current discussions about the destruction of cultural heritage. We also talk about the challenges of writing history for a broader reading public. « Click for More »

Episode 400 with Nir Shafir hosted by Suzie Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud 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. « Click for More »

Episode 399 with Zeynep Çelik hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan and Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud 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 themselves. Telling us about a number of paintings, monuments, scholarly writings and stories, she argues that Orientalism is still relevant and with us wherever we go. « Click for More »

Episode 398 with Şevket Pamuk hosted by Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud 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 at protecting domestic industries. From the 1980s until the present, the Turkish government came to embrace the set of policy recommendations now called the Washington Consensus, defined by trade liberalization, privatization, and de-regulation. We discuss key moments during each of these periods, comparing Turkey to other countries around the world. We also discuss broader historical debates about Islam in economic history as well as approaches to the economic as an object of study. « Click for More »

Episode 395 with Metin Atmaca hosted by Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud 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, and how did they become the rebel lands they are today? In this episode, we speak with Metin Atmaca about the rise and fall of Kurdish emirs who ruled in the Ottoman-Iranian borderlands, from their rise in the 1500s to their fall in the 1850s. We also discuss the afterlife of the Kurdish dynastic families who, in exile, re-invented themselves as political leaders, bureaucrats, and rebels in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. « Click for More »

Episode 391 with Stefano Taglia hosted by Taylan Güngör Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud 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 the social life of the Ottoman Empire and its capital and, in this sense, helps expand a field that is somewhat limited. « Click for More »

Episode 386 with Suzy Hansen hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud 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 Turkey have been intertwined. In this conversation with Suzy Hansen about her award-winning book "Notes on a Foreign Country," we critically examine the formation of journalistic and scholarly expertise, and we discuss reactions of readers and reviewers to Hansen's work. « Click for More »

Episode 382 with Ohannes Kılıçdağı hosted by Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The history of Ottoman Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire is inevitably in the shadow of 1915. In today’s episode, we explore new approaches to this history with Dr. Ohannes Kılıçdağı. We speak in particular about the hopes that the empire’s Armenian citizens attached to the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, which were high indeed. On the basis of research utilizing Armenian-language periodicals from across the empire, Kılıçdağı explains how the Armenian community enthusiastically embraced military conscription, and how this phenomenon connects to the theme of citizenship in the late Ottoman Empire more generally. We conclude by considering what use there is for history in the politics of the present. « Click for More »

Episode 379 with Ahmet Ersoy & Deniz Türker hosted by Matthew Ghazarian and Zeinab Azarbadegan Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud How did the Ottomans come to visually represent their mythical origins? And to what ends? In this episode we speak with Ahmet Ersoy and Deniz Türker about the formation, development, and visualization of Ertuğrul sancak, the mythical birthplace of the Ottoman dynasty. In 1886, Sultan Abdülhamid II commissioned an expedition of military photographers, painters, and cartographers to record the region, its architecture, and its nomadic tribes. Ersoy and Türker talk to us this mission and its economic and diplomatic ramifications, drawing on their recent exhibition, Ottoman Arcadia, at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul. Our discussion touches on the proliferation and dissemination of visual materials during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), as well as his massive collection of visual materials held today as part of the Yıldız Palace Library. « Click for More »