Related Guides
Featured Resources
- The Ottomans: Europe's Muslim Emperors (streaming, Academic Video Online) This fascinating series, presented by Rageh Omaar, recounts the epic story of one of the largest and most influential empires in world history from its origins in the thirteenth century through to its bloody final throes on the battlefields of WWI - and looks also at how, with the Empire collapsed, the European colonial powers carved up its former lands in ways that haunt us still.
- Ottoman History Podcast A podcast about the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, and the Islamic world
- BU Initiative on Cities The Initiative on Cities serves as a hub for urban related research and teaching across Boston University. We engage with urban leaders, policymakers, academics, and students from around the world to work toward sustainable, just, and inclusive urban transformation.
- Istanbul | Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Research portal focused on the modern urban history of Istanbul
Online Books
Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City by
For millennia, the city stood out against the landscape, walled and compact. This concept of the city was long accepted as adequate for characterizing the urban experience. However, the nature of the city, both real and imagined, has always been more permeable than this model reveals. The essays in Urban Imaginaries respond to this condition by focusing on how social and physical space is conceived as both indefinite and singular. They emphasize the ways this space is shared and thus made into urban culture. Urban Imaginaries offers case studies on cities in Brazil, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and India, as well as in the United States and France, and in doing so blends social, cultural, and political approaches to better understand the contemporary urban experience. Contributors: Margaret Cohen, Stanford U; Camilla Fojas, De Paul U; Beatriz Jaguaribe, Federal U of Rio de Janeiro; Anthony D. King, SUNY Binghamton; Mark LeVine, U of California, Irvine; Srirupa Roy, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Seteney Shami, Social Science Research Council; AbdouMaliq Simone, New School U; Maha Yahya; Deniz Yükseker, Koç U, Istanbul. Alev Çinar is associate professor of political science and public administration at Bilkent University, Turkey. Thomas Bender is university professor of the humanities and history at New York University.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2007
Modernism and Nation-Building: Turkish architectural culture in the early republic by
Winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians Winner of the M. Fuat Koprulu Book Prize in Turkish Studies sponsored by the Turkish Studies Association With the proclamation of the Turkish republic by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, Turkey's political and intellectual elites attempted to forge from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire a thoroughly modern, secular, European nation-state. Among many other public expressions of this bold social experiment, they imported modern architecture as both a visible symbol and an effective instrument of their modernizing agenda. They abandoned the prevailing Ottoman revivalist style and transformed the entire profession of architecture in Turkey according to the aesthetic canons and rationalist doctrines of European modernism. In this book, the architectural historian Sibel Bozdogan offers a cultural history of modern Turkish architecture and its impact on European modernism from the Young Turk revolution of 1908 to the end of the Kemalist single-party regime in 1950. Drawing on official propaganda publications, professional architectural journals, and popular magazines of the day, Bozdogan looks at Turkish architectural culture in its broad political, historical, and ideological context. She shows how modern architecture came to be the primary visual expression of the so-called republican revolution--especially in the case of representative public buildings and in the idealized form of the modern house. She also illustrates Turkish architects? efforts to legitimize modern forms on rational, scientific grounds and to ?nationalize? them by showing their compatibility with Turkish building traditions. After Ataturk's death in 1938, the initial revolutionary spirit in Turkish architectural culture gave way to nationalist trends in German and Italian architecture and to the inspiration of Central Asian and pre-Islamic Turkish monuments. The resulting departure from the distinct modernist aesthetic of the early 1930s toward a more classicized and monumental architecture representative of state power brought this heroic era of modern Turkish history to a close. Today, when Turkey's project of modernity is being critically reevaluated from many perspectives, this comprehensive survey of Kemalism's architectural legacy is timely and provocative.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2001
Turkey: The Quest for Identity by
This concise history tells the story of Turkey, a country caught between the ideologies of East and West. Feroz Ahmad provides a full survey of Turkey's chequered history, from its beginnings as a disparate group of tribes to its status as the first secular republic in the Islamic world. In addition to providing a detailed account of the key cultural, economic and social events, this accessible text also examines the problems faced by modern Turkey, from the rise of Islamic militancy to current tension in Turkey's government.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks DR440 .A625 2003 and online via HathiTrustPublication Date: 2003
Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: a History, 1789-2007 by
Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity reveals the historical dynamics propelling two centuries of Ottoman and Turkish history. As mounting threats to imperial survival necessitated dynamic responses, ethnolinguistic and religious identities inspired alternative strategies for engaging with modernity. A radical, secularizing current of change competed with a conservative, Islamically committed current. Crises sharpened the differentiation of the two currents, forcing choices between them. The radical current began with the formation of reformist governmental elites and expanded with the advent of “print capitalism,” symbolized by the privately owned, Ottoman-language newspapers. The radicals engineered the 1908 Young Turk revolution, ruled empire and republic until 1950, made secularism a lasting “belief system,” and still retain powerful positions. The conservative current gained impetus from three history-making Islamic renewal movements, those of Mevlana Halid, Said Nursi, and Fethullah G#65533;len. Powerful under the empire, Islamic conservatives did not regain control of government until the 1980s. By then they, too, had their own influential media. Findley's reassessment of political, economic, social, and cultural history reveals the dialectical interaction between radical and conservative currents of change, which alternately clashed and converged to shape late Ottoman and republican Turkish history.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2010
