Book Series: Books published by the Center for Turkish Studies

This is the first attempt to present a comprehensive picture of immigration to the United States from the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, consisting of historical overviews, case studies of recent Turkish immigrants’ adaptation to contemporary American life and their attitudes towards Islam, and essays on sources.

Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World is a collection of articles authored by the students and colleagues of Norman Itzkowitz. The contributors include Engin Deniz Akarli, Karl K. Barbir, Cornell H. Fleischer, Jane Hathaway, Cemal Kafadar, Metin Kunt, Rudi Paul Lindner, Heath W. Lowry, Scott Redford, Vamik D. Volkan, and others.

Norman Itzkowitz was Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University until his retirement in 2001, and published more than a dozen books in three languages focusing on Ottoman history and psychobiography. In recognition of his exceptional contributions to the education and training of his students in Middle East and Ottoman studies, Itzkowitz received the Middle East Studies Association Mentoring Award in 2007.

The studies of Bosnia in this volume encompass more than four hundred years of history and offer a broad, multidimensional view of this vital Ottoman territory. Written by native and foreign specialists, these studies evaluate and seek also to rescue and preserve the legacy of the extraordinarily important buildings, manuscripts, and other cultural artifacts destroyed during the war of 1992–1995.

Ottoman Borderlands brings together articles by prominent scholars to fill a large gap in Ottoman studies—the study of the borderlands. Despite the pressing power of the central government, the frontier provinces and the semiautonomous borderlands were cultural-social units with their own identities and their own internal dynamics. While the core provinces were more Ottoman, Islamic, and Turkish-speaking, the borderlands were culturally, religiously, and linguistically more heterogeneous, as well as more politically autonomous.

Rebellion in a vast empire
In the course of its more than six-hundred-year history, the Ottoman Empire weathered rebellions and threats of rebellion from every quarter, both within the imperial capital and in its far-flung provinces. Mutinies and threats of mutiny were likewise not infrequent occurrences. This collection of essays is the first collaborative volume devoted to the subject of rebellion, and more particularly, mutiny, in the Ottoman Empire.

Regionalism and ethnic diversity were key contributing factors to mutiny and rebellion in the middle period, both within the Empire and without. A mutiny or rebellion provides a moment of social stress in which underlying societal tensions, and the state’s ability to cope with them, stand out with unusual clarity. This exercise in comparing intra-Ottoman mutinies leads to broader comparisons between Ottoman and other societies, helping to break down the historiographical and cultural barriers