Conventional wisdom on the history of nationalism tells us that nations are of recent construction, and this has often been the case within the historiography of the modern Middle East. For the case of Palestine, some have denied the significance of the n

Historians have used accounts of the ritual slaughter of horses as evidence of non-Islamic and Central Asian elements within early Ottoman identity. However, such an interpretation may miss the real significance of these historical accounts and the practi

Tozsuz Evrak is a new blog by Ottoman History Podcast that narrates the history of the Ottoman Empire in tiny fragments, short posts showcasing interesting archival documents and primary sources. In this podcast, we present some of these documents and dis

Ottoman society was comprised of many different communities with overlapping linguistic, ethnic, and confessional identities. One such community, the Karamanlis of Anatolia, was a group that spoke Turkish and shared in a common Anatolian folk culture but

Dreams are an essential part of the human experience but are attributed different significance in various times and places. For many Ottomans, dreams were a forum for the revelation of hidden or unseen knowledge, and dream narratives as well as their inte

While there are many travel narratives from the early modern era, few match Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatnâme in terms of richness and detail. As an Ottoman gentleman or çelebi, Evliya was able to travel throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East and reco

Historians have used classical Ottoman texts to explore social issues such as sexuality, with compiled manuscripts from various literary genres often forming a data-mine for historical information. However, this type of selective reading has often distort

Groups variously labeled as nomadic and tribal formed an integral part of Ottoman society, but because their communities exercises a wide degree of autonomy, they are often represented as somehow separate or "other" to urban and settled populations. Howev

Unlike many historical topics, drug use is often absent in the historical record due to its illicit nature. However, thanks to authorities who sought to control the drug trade and commentators that wrote about drug culture, we can piece together some of t

The interwar period was an era of significant change in urban-rural relations throughout the world and witnessed an unprecedented use of technology in the agrarian and ecological spheres. Most notably, class specific urban movements posed as apolitical in