San Antonio College Library

This book examines the modernist nation-building processes in post-Ottoman Turkey through a perspective that stresses social and cultural dimensions and everyday negotiations of the Kemalist reforms. Drawing on archival evidence and oral interviews, the author asks how the reforms were mediated and how citizens received, reacted to, and experienced them. It traces the experiences of the subaltern, the elites and the mediators-highlighting the relevance...

"On the night of September 6-7, 1955, the Greek community of Istanbul was violently struck throughout the expanse of Turkey's most important metropolis. Within hours, businesses, homes, and even the churches of the Greeks were in ruins, with the British press calculating the damage at $100 million. It was the beginning of the end for the ethnic descendants of the city's founders, who had settled this eastern tip of Europe two and a half millennia...

"In the Ottoman Empire, as in many countries around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries education was critical to the state's efforts to redefine its relationship with its subjects. This book presents a many-sided view of education under the Ottoman Empire in this period. Drawing on a wide array of primary material, ranging from archival reports to textbooks and classroom maps, Benjamin C. Fortna provides a detailed scholarly...

"Imprisoned in a remote Turkish prison camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around camp, and one day, a Turkish officer approaches Jones with a...