History Commons^™

Western History: What’S Gender Got To Do With It?, Margaret D. Jacobs

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In a recent essay, Susan Lee Johnson takes western historians to task for neglecting western women’s and gender history in their work.1 When Western Historical Quarterly asked me to write this essay on the impact of western women’s and gender history on our field, I thought it would be an ideal opportunity to test Johnson’s bold assertions. But how do you measure such impact? I could have highlighted some of the outstanding works that western women’s and gender historians have produced in the last thirty years, but I thought it might be more useful and telling to analyze general western …

The Armenians Of Palestine 1918-48, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

For the Armenians of Palestine, the three decades of the Mandate were probably the most momentous in their fifteen hundred-year presence in the country. The period witnessed the community’s profound transformation under the double impacts of Britain’s Palestine policy and waves of destitute Armenian refugees fleeing the massacres in Anatolia. The article presents, against the background of late Ottoman rule, a comprehensive overview of the community, including the complexities and role of the religious hierarchy, the initially difficult encounter between the indigenous Armenians and the new refugee majority, their politics and associations, and their remarkable economic recovery. By the early …

The Genocide Archives Of The Armenian Patriarchate Of Jerusalem, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The Armenian Genocide left behind a plethora of unexamined information in the language of the "victim group." Examining these documents will not only reaffirm the veracity of the historical event, it will also provide historians new ways of understanding, analyzing, and researching the Genocide. The available Armenian sources could be divided into private archives, ecclesiastic archives, diaries and eyewitness accounts, Armenian press articles, and original historical works written by the survivors themselves or prepared by the PanArmenian Unions founded by the dispersed Armenian communities. In the name of academic objectivity, some historians have downplayed the importance of these sources in …

The Taboo Within The Taboo: The Fate Of ‘Armenian Capital’ At The End Of The Ottoman Empire, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

One of the marginalized topics in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire in general, and that of the Armenian Genocide in particular, is the fate of ‘Armenian capital’ during World War I. Ottoman historians have often been inclined to highlight the great achievements that Armenians made in the field of economy in the Ottoman Empire as sarrafs, bankers, merchants and industrialists. However, when a scholar starts examining or questioning the fate of ‘Armenian capital’ in the Empire, he/she is immediately suspected of having a political or nationalistic agenda. Scholars therefore usually try to avoid dealing with this ‘sensitive’ issue …

Connelly Roundtable, Thomas Borstlemann

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Let me show my cards. I am partially responsible for this interchange, since I had the pleasure of chairing the program committee for the 2010 OAH annual meeting and organizing the plenary session on “The United States and the World” at which Matt Connelly first delivered this paper. I invited him because I knew he would be insightful and I hoped he would be provocative. The audience and I were not disappointed on either count. I have been an enthusiastic (though not uncritical1) fan of Matt’s work for a long time.

I am a bit older than Matt and have …

From Bloodless Revolution To Bloody Counterrevolution: The Adana Massacres Of 1909, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The historiography of the Adana Massacres of 1909 is represented by two diverging views. While some Turkish scholars deny the involvement of the local government officials in the massacres by putting all of the blame on the Armenians who revolted as part of a conspiracy to establish a kingdom in Cilicia, some Armenian scholars, whose work is overshadowed by the Armenian genocide, accuse the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) of acting behind the scenes to destroy the Armenian economic infrastructure in Adana in order to curb any future political and economic development in the area. By deviating from the …

The “Definitiveness” Of Genocide And A Question Of Genocide: A Review Essay, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Over the course of the past two decades, the historiography of the Armenian Genocide has evolved through the introduction of new methodologies, approaches, and more complex analyses of the Genocide that venture beyond rudimentary and essentialist arguments and representations. Concomitantly, denialist literature has also developed, reinvigorated in the U.S. by the presentation of alternative ways of viewing the event in order to counter “Armenian allegations.” The latest such endeavor, disguised under the cloak of “scholarship,” has been the introduction of the concept of “crimes against humanity” as an alternative designation to genocide or as a new “compromise” when dealing with …

Administrating The Non-Muslims And "The Question Of Jerusalem" After The Young Turk Revolution, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The historiography on the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 in general has mainly concentrated on the impact of the Revolution on the Ottoman Turkish society. Rarely do we see works that deal with the impact of the Revolution on the non-dominant groups in the Empire from a comparative perspective. How did the different ethnic groups view the Revolution? How did the Revolution influence the dynamics of power inside these groups? What were the relations between the Revolution and the religious groups within the Empire? How did the local /central government view the transformations taking place among the non-Muslim communities in …