History Research Guide

Set like a stronghold south-west of the Caucasus mountains, Armenia is caught "Between East and West. Briefly a great empire in the first century BCE under King Tigranes the Great, Armenia was later incorporated first by the Sasanian and then the Byzantine Empires. Armenian art, literature, religion and material culture have reinterpreted elements of a wide variety of cultures. Spanning over two and a half millennia, the history of Armenia and the Armenian people is a series of riveting tales, from its first mention under the Achaemenid King Darius I to the independence of the Republic of Armenia from the Soviet Union."

"After the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which over a million Armenians died, thousands of Armenians lived and worked in the Turkish state alongside those who had persecuted their communities. Living in the context of pervasive denial, how did Armenians remaining in Turkey record their own history? Here, Talin Suciyan explores the life experienced by these Armenian communities as Turkey's modernisation project of the twentieth century gathered pace."

"Though immediately recognizable in public discourse as a modern state in a political "hot zone," Armenia has a material history and visual culture that reaches back to the Paleolithic era. This book presents a timely and much-needed survey of the arts of Armenia from antiquity to the early eighteenth century C.E. Divided chronologically, it brings into discussion a wide range of media, including architecture, stone sculpture, works in metal, wood, and cloth, manuscript illumination, and ceramic arts."

"The Grandchildrenis a collection of intimate, harrowing testimonies by grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Turkey's "forgotten Armenians"--the orphans adopted and Islamized by Muslims after the Armenian genocide."

"The destruction of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 was the greatest atrocity of World War I. Around one million Armenians were killed, and the survivors were scattered across the world. Although it is now a century old, the issue of what most of the world calls the Armenian Genocide of 1915 is still a live and divisive issue that mobilizes Armenians across the world, shapes the identity and politics of modern Turkey, and has consumed the attention of U.S. politicians for years.s."

"There is a great deal of interest in the history of Armenia since its renewed independence in the 1990s and the ongoing debate about the genocide - an interest that informs the strong desire of a new generation of Armenian Americans to learn more about their heritage and has led to greater solidarity in the community. By integrating themes such as war, geopolitics, and great leaders, with the less familiar cultural themes and personal stories, this book will appeal to general readers and travellers interested in the region."

"This is the biography of Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist and political activist. He worked for the democratic rights of all Turkish citizens, including the right to speak freely about the genocide of Anatolia's Armenians in 1915. As a result of his activism, Dink was assassinated by Turkish nationalists in 2007. As founder and editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper, Agos, in 1996, Dink was the first secular voice of Turkey's silenced Christian-Armenian minority. He fought for the democratization of the Turkish political system."

"Arlene Avakian's memoir evokes the quarrels, ambition, prejudice, and courage that shaped her coming of age in a family that immigrated to the United States to escape genocide in Turkey. Inspired by her passionate feminism and strengthened within a loving lesbian relationship, Avakian records and re-examines her personal history, discovering the story of her grandmother, which brings with it a legacy of radical politics and a powerful affirmation of ethnic identity."

"This book..sees it as its main objective to present the Armenians to the foreign reader, their history but also their lives and achievements in the present that finds most Armenians dispersed throughout the world. 3000 years after their appearance in history, 1700 years after adopting Christianity and almost 90 years after the greatest catastrophe in their history."

"From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the city of Ani was the jewel of the Armenian kingdom, renowned far and wide for its magnificent buildings. Known as the city of 1001 churches, Ani was a center for artistic innovation, and its architecture is a potential missing link between Byzantine and Gothic styles. By the fifteenth century, Ani was virtually abandoned, its stunning buildings left to crumble. Yet its ruins have remained a symbol of cultural accomplishment that looms large in the Armenian imagination."

"It has long been assumed that no Armenian presence remained in eastern Turkey after the 1915 massacres. As a result of what has come to be called the Armenian Genocide, those who survived in Anatolia were assimilated as Muslims, with most losing all traces of their Christian identity. In fact, some did survive and together with their children managed during the last century to conceal their origins."

"This book brings together the Armenian Genocide process and its transgenerational outcome, which are often juxtaposed in existing scholarship, to ask how the Armenian Genocide is conceptualized and placed within diasporic communities."

"Early in his career, Adolf Hitler took inspiration from Benito Mussolini, his senior colleague in fascism--this fact is widely known. But an equally important role model for Hitler and the Nazis has been almost entirely neglected: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Stefan Ihrig's compelling presentation of this untold story promises to rewrite our understanding of the roots of Nazi ideology and strategy."

"At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents and encompassed extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity among the estimated thirty million people living within its borders. It was perhaps the most cosmopolitan state in the world--and possibly the most volatile. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire now gives scholars and general readers a concise history of the late empire between 1789 and 1918, turbulent years marked by incredible social change."

"Highlights the efforts put forth by ecclesiastics, publicists, and diplomats in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and Bulgaria in developing and implementing various plans to reconcile ethnic differences within existing religious and dynastic frameworks. The arrangements were often inspired by modern visions of a political and cultural union of Orthodox Slavs and Greeks. Whether put into effect or simply discussed, they demonstrate the strength and flexibility of supranational identities and institutions on the eve of the First World War."

"In the early part of the twentieth century, as Europe began its descent into the First World War, the Ottoman world once the largest Empire in the Middle East began to experience a revolution which would culminate in the new, secular Turkish state. Alongside this, in 1915, as part of an increasing nationalism, it enacted a genocide against its Armenian citizens. In this new study, Hans-Lukas Kieser marshals a dazzling array of scholars to re-evaluate the approach and legacy of the Young Turks whose eradication of the Armenians from Asia Minor would have far-reaching consequences."

"The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was by no means a singular event. After six hundred years of ruling over the peoples of North Africa, the Balkans and Middle East, the death throes of sultanate encompassed a series of wars, insurrections, and revolutions spanning the early twentieth century. This volume encompasses a full accounting of the political, economic, social, and international forces that brought about the passing of the Ottoman state. In surveying the many tragedies that transpired in the years between 1908 and 1922,"

"Covering the full history of the Ottoman Empire, from its genesis in post-Mongol Eurasia to its dissolution after the Great War in Europe, this textbook takes a holistic approach, considering the Ottoman worldview - what it was, how it came together, and how it fell apart."

"The modern Middle East emerged out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when Britain and France partitioned the Ottoman Arab lands into several new colonial states. The following period was a charged and transformative time of unrest. Insurgent leaders, trained in Ottoman military tactics and with everything to lose from the fall of the Empire, challenged the mandatory powers in a number of armed revolts."

"An astonishing retelling of twentieth-century history from the Ottoman perspective, delivering profound new insights into World War I and the contemporary Middle East Between 1911 and 1922, a series of wars would engulf the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, in which the central conflict, of course, is World War I--a story we think we know well. As Sean McMeekin shows us in this revelatory new history of what he calls the "wars of the Ottoman succession," we know far less than we think."

"Offers a multi-faceted story of how the Ottoman Empire tried to cope with the challenges of permanent mobilization under total war conditions which reshaped state-society relations. By focusing mainly on Anatolia and the Muslim population, Mehmet Besikci argues that the conditions of mobilization pushed the Ottoman state to become more centralized, authoritarian and nationalist, but the increasing dependence on people paradoxically also enlarged their space of action vis- -vis state authority."

"Covering the period from 1878-1915, Ottomans and Armenians is a military history of the Ottoman army and the counterinsurgency campaigns it waged in the last days of the Ottoman empire. Although Ottomans were among the most active practitioners of counterinsurgency campaigning in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in the vast literature available on counterinsurgency in the early twenty-first century, there is very little scholarly analysis of how Ottomans reacted to insurgency and then went about counterinsurgency."

"Three of the formative revolutions that shook the early twentieth-century world occurred almost simultaneously in regions bordering each other. Though the Russian, Iranian, and Young Turk Revolutions all exploded between 1904 and 1911, they have never been studied through their linkages until now."

"The destruction of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire was an unprecedented tragedy. Even amidst the horrors of the First World War, Theodore Roosevelt insisted that it was the greatest crime of the conflict. The wartime mass killing of approximately one million Armenian Christians was the culmination of a series of massacres that Winston Churchill would later recall had roused publics on both sides of the Atlantic and inspired fervent appeals to save the Armenians."

"The Ottoman revolution of 1908 is a study in contradictions--a positive manifestation of modernity intended to reinstate constitutional rule, yet ultimately a negative event that shook the fundamental structures of the empire, opening up ethnic, religious, and political conflicts. Shattered Dreams of Revolution considers this revolutionary event to tell the stories of three important groups: Arabs, Armenians, and Jews."

"The break-up of the Ottoman empire and the disintegration of the Russian empire were watershed events in modern history. The unravelling of these empires was both cause and consequence of World War I and resulted in the deaths of millions. It irrevocably changed the landscape of the Middle East and Eurasia and reverberates to this day in conflicts throughout the Caucasus and Middle East. Shattering Empires draws on extensive research in the Ottoman and Russian archives to tell the story of the rivalry and collapse of two great empires."

"This book argues that religious affiliation was in fact the most influential shaper of communal identity in the Ottoman era, that religion moulded the relationship between state and society, and that it continues to do so today in lands once occupied by the Ottomans. The book examines the major transformations of the past 250 years to illustrate this argument, traversing the nineteenth century, the early decades of post-Ottoman independence, and the recent past."

"This book stems from a three-day international conference held in May 2012 at which scholars examined the causes and consequences of World War I, with a distinctive focus on how these events pertained to the Ottoman state and society."

"With the end of the First World War, the centuries-old social fabric of the Ottoman world an entangled space of religious co-existence throughout the Balkans and the Middle East came to its definitive end. In this new study, Hans-Lukas Kieser argues that while the Ottoman Empire officially ended in 1922, when the Turkish nationalists in Ankara abolished the Sultanate, the essence of its imperial character was destroyed in 1915 when the Young Turk regime eradicated the Armenians from Asia Minor."

"The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 reverberated across the Middle East and Europe and ushered in a new era for the Ottoman Empire. The initial military uprising in the Balkans triggered a constitutional revolution, in which social mobilization and the political aspirations of the Young Turks played a crucial role...Provides a new analysis of this process in the Balkans and the Anatolian provinces, outlining the transition from revolutionary euphoria to increasing tensions at local and central levels."

"Before Rwanda and Bosnia, and before the Holocaust, the first genocide of the twentieth century happened in Turkish Armenia in 1915, when approximately one million people were killed. This volume is an account of the American response to this atrocity." T

"Seven decades after the destruction of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian genocide remains largely ignored by governments and forgotten by the world public, even though the annihilation of Armenians was headlined around the world in 1915. Scholarly investigation of the Armenian genocide is just beginning, made more difficult by the tendency of many establishment figures to rationalize the past and the attempt of perpetrator governments and their successors to deny the past."

"An analysis of the Turkish position regarding the Armenian claims of genocide during World War I and the continuing debate over this issue, the author offers an equal examination of each side's historical position. The book asks "what is genocide?" and illustrates that although this is a useful concept to describe such evil events as the Jewish Holocaust in World War II and Rwanda in the 1990s, the term has also been overused, misused, and therefore trivialized by many different groups seeking to demonize their antagonists and win sympathetic approbation for them."

"In this groundbreaking history of the Armenian Genocide, the critically acclaimed author...brings us a riveting narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Peter Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Young Turk government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I."

"Historical research into the Armenian Genocide has grown tremendously in recent years, but much of it has focused on large-scale questions related to Ottoman policy or the scope of the killing. Consequently, surprisingly little is known about the actual experiences of the genocide's victims. Daily Life in the Abyss illuminates this aspect through the intertwined stories of two Armenian families who endured forced relocation and deprivation in and around modern-day Syria."

"While much of the international community regards the forced deportation of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, where approximately 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished, as genocide, the Turkish state still officially denies it.In Denial of Violence, Fatma Muge Gocek seeks to decipher the roots of this disavowal."

"This memoir recalls Yervant Alexanian's death-defying experiences in the center of the Armenian Genocide. Like other Armenians of his generation, he was an eyewitness to the massacre and dislocation of his family and fellow countrymen in Ottoman Turkey during World War I."

"The final years of the Ottoman Empire were catastrophic ones for its non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities. From 1913 to 1923, its rulers deported, killed, or otherwise persecuted staggering numbers of citizens in an attempt to preserve "Turkey for the Turks," setting a modern precedent for how a regime can commit genocide in pursuit of political ends while largely escaping accountability."

"Demonstrates the vital importance of Ottoman and other relevant archives in Turkey for the study of the Armenian question. Historians, assisted by newly discovered or recently published materials, must continually reassess events of the past in order to achieve a rounder view. The Armenian events of 1915 are certainly no exception. This study encourages further engagement between the policy-making and the scholarly communities by indicating the continued importance of past records and documents for today's pressing debates."

"Turkey's bid to join the European Union has lent new urgency to the issue of the Armenian Genocide as differing interpretations of the genocide are proving to be a major reason for the delay of the its accession. This book provides vital background information and is a prime source of legal evidence and authentic Turkish eyewitness testimony of the intent and the crime of genocide against the Armenians."

"The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought...For many Germans, the Armenians represented an explicitly racial problem and despite the Armenians' Christianity, Germans portrayed them as the "Jews of the Orient."...As Stefan Ihrig reveals in this first comprehensive study of the subject, many Germans before World War I sympathized with the Ottomans' longstanding repression of the Armenians and would go on to defend vigorously the Turks' wartime program of extermination."

"The book represents an earthquake in genocide studies, particularly in the field of Armenian Genocide research. A unique feature of the Armenian Genocide has been the long-standing efforts of successive Turkish governments to deny its historicity and to hide the documentary evidence surrounding it. This book provides a major clarification of the often blurred lines between facts and truth in regard to these events."

"The role of the mass media in genocide is multifaceted with respect to the disclosure and flow of information. This volume investigates questions of responsibility, denial, victimisation and marginalisation through an analysis of the media representations of the Armenian genocide in different national contexts."

"This book, written by a political scientist, offers a different approach: It doesn't concentrate on the past; it concentrates on the present, and shows how this past event is perceived and discussed today. The idea is that the arguments deployed in this debate, those which allege that what happened amounts to genocide and those which deny this claim reveal something about cognitive structures of present agents, such as the Turkish government, as well as about the meaning and use of the term "genocide"."

"A masterful account of the assassins who hunted down the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. In 1921, a tightly knit band of killers set out to avenge the deaths of almost one million victims of the Armenian Genocide. They were a humble bunch: an accountant, a life insurance salesman, a newspaper editor, an engineering student, and a diplomat. Together they formed one of the most effective assassination squads in history."

"A cross-genre book that uses narrative, memoir, unpublished letters, and other primary and secondary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men who organized Operation Nemesis, a covert operation created to assassinate the Turkish architects of the Armenian Genocide. The leaders of Operation Nemesis took it upon themselves to seek justice for their murdered families, friends, and compatriots."

"Pertinent to contemporary demands for reparations from Turkey is the relationship between law and property in connection with the Armenian Genocide. This book examines the confiscation of Armenian properties during the genocide and subsequent attempts to retain seized Armenian wealth."

"The first English-language biography of the de facto ruler of the late Ottoman Empire and architect of the Armenian Genocide Talaat Pasha (1874-1921) led the triumvirate that ruled the late Ottoman Empire during World War I and is arguably the father of modern Turkey. He was also the architect of the Armenian Genocide, which would result in the systematic extermination of more than a million people."

"A reappraisal of the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, and then the Turkish Republic, against their Christian minorities. Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent...The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population."

"The first genocide of the twentieth century remains unrecognized and unpunished. Turkey continues to deny the slaughter of over a million Ottoman Armenians in 1915 and the following years. What sets the Armenian genocide apart from other mass atrocities is that the country responsible has never officially acknowledged its actions, and no individual has ever been brought to justice."