Research Guides: HIST 270: From Empire to Nation: The Ottoman World Transformed (HC): Primary Sources

Memoirs and Other Personal Accounts

Primary sources can take many different forms. Letters, accounts and other kinds of documents written at the time of an event or era allow a nuanced and detailed understanding of historical issues. Material below explains ways to locate primary sources in Tripod and Worldcat. To find additional primary sources, historical studies in books and journal articles will often offer the best recommendations. Check footnotes and bibliographies for references to material written in the medieval period.

Finding Primary Sources

Primary sources that are in the Tricollege libraries will often be listed in Tripod under subject words combined with such terms as "sources", "correspondence", or "personal narratives". Examples include:

Remembering Childhood in the Middle East by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (Editor); Robert A. Fernea (Introduction by)
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ISBN: 0292798733
Publication Date: 2010-09-01
See the memoirs in the sections The end of the Ottoman Empire (1923) and European colonial rule and the rise of Arab nationalism (1830-1967.
Available in both print and ebook copies.
Sephardi Lives by Julia Philips Cohen; Sarah Abrevaya Stein
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ISBN: 9780804771658
Publication Date: 2014-08-27
This ground-breaking documentary history contains over 150 primary sources originally written in 15 languages by or about Sephardi Jews--descendants of Jews who fled medieval Spain and Portugal settling in the western portions of the Ottoman Empire. Reflecs Sephardi history in all its diversity, from the courtyard to the courthouse, spheres intimate, political, commercial, familial, and religious.
Also available in Tripod as an ebook.

ARMENIA

Goodbye, Antoura by Karnig Panian
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ISBN: 1503600637
Publication Date: 2016-10-01
When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly 1,000 Armenian and 400 Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care. This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years--as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage.
The Hundred-Year Walk by Dawn Anahid MacKeen
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ISBN: 9780618982660
Publication Date: 2016-01-12
An epic tale of one man's courage in the face of genocide and his granddaughter's quest to tell his story. In the heart of the Ottoman Empire as World War I rages, Stepan Miskjian's world becomes undone. He is separated from his family as they are swept up in the government's mass deportation of Armenians into internment camps.
My Grandmother by Fethiye Çetin; Maureen Freely (Translator); Elif Shafak (Foreword by)
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ISBN: 9781844671694
Publication Date: 2008-04-17
When Fethiya Cetin discovered that her grandmother was an Armenian, saved by the Turkish captain who went on to adopt her, Cetin set out to find her grandmother's lost relations in America.

Titles you can request through EZ Borrow or Interlibrary Loan:

The black raven. Author: Mathossentz, Murad, 1897-. Policy Research, 1988.

Forced into genocide : memoirs of an Armenian soldier in the Ottoman Turkish army. Author: Alexanian, Yervant, 1895-1983. Transaction Publishers, 2017.

Memoirs of Sarkis Narzakian. Author: Narzakian, Sarkis. Gomidas Institute, 1995.

GREECE

A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica by Aron Rodrigue (Editor); Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Editor); Isaac Jerusalmi (Translator)
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ISBN: 9780804771665
Publication Date: 2012-01-11
The memoirist, Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi (1820-1903), wrote about Ottoman Jews' daily life at a time when the finely wrought fabric of Ottoman society was just beginning to unravel. His vivid portrayal of life in Salonica, a major port in the Ottoman Levant with a majority Jewish population, thus provides a unique window into a way of life before it disappeared as a result of profound political and social changes and the World Wars.
Also available as an ebook: .B H
The memoirs of Doctor Meir Yoel : an autobiographical source on social change in Salonika at the turn of the 20th century by Yoel, Meir, 1866-1943.
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ISBN: 9789754284379
Publication Date: 2011

Title you can request through EZ Borrow or Interlibrary Loan:

I remember Rhodes. Author: Levy, Rebecca Amato, 1912-. Sepher-Hermon Press for Sephardic House at Congregation Shearith Israel, 1987

IRAQ

Farewell, Babylon by Kattan, Naïm, 1928-
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ISBN: 0771044704
Publication Date: 1976
Memoir of growing up as a Jew in Baghdad in the 1940s and 50s.
Memories of Eden by Violette Shamash; Tony Rocca (Editor); Mira Rocca (Editor); Shmuel Moreh
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ISBN: 9780810126343
Publication Date: 2010-04-28
Reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912.

Memoirs and Other Personal Accounts (Continued)

PALESTINE

Arthur Ruppin: memoirs, diaries, letters. by Ruppin, Arthur, 1876-1943.
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ISBN: 78185894
Publication Date: 1971
This Jewish author grew up in Poland and moved to Palestine in 1908.
Year of the Locust: a Soldier's Diary and the Erasure of Palestine's Ottoman Past by Salim Tamari; Ihsan Salih Turjman
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ISBN: 1283277891
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
"Year of the Locust" captures the end of the Ottoman world and a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. In the diaries of Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman (1893 1917), the first ordinary recruit to describe World War I from the Arab side, we follow the misadventures of an Ottoman soldier stationed in Jerusalem with soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds.

Title you can request through EZ Borrow or Interlibrary Loan:

A Palestine diary : memoirs of a Bilu pioneer, 1882-1887. Author: Hisin, Hayyim, 1865-1932. Herzl Press, 1976.

TURKEY

Beyond Constantinople by Victor Eskenazi
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ISBN: 9781784532666
Publication Date: 2016-07-30
Victor Eskenazi, a Sephardic Jew from Constantinople, represented an ethnic and religious minority that thrived in the Ottoman Empire. The beginning of the twentieth century was a critical period in Ottoman history. Eskenazi breathed the complex air of this budding new Turkey, with its ideals, contradictions and hopes.
Haim Nahum by Esther Benbassa (Editor, Introduction by); Miriam Kochan (Translator)
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ISBN: 081730729X
Publication Date: 1995-06-30
This book relates the history of Turkish Jewry during the last decades of the Ottoman empire, as told through the life and work of Haim Nahum, the Chief Rabbi of the Ottoman empire from 1909 to 1920.
Memoirs of Halide Edib by Halide Edib
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ISBN: 0405045689
Publication Date: 1972-11-01
Turkish feminist Edib recounts her childhood, marriage and efforts to become an author in two volumes of memoirs published in 1926 and 1928. The second volume is entitled The Turkish ordeal: being the further memoirs of Halidé Edib B H.

News

Newspapers published during an historical era can serve as useful primary sources. Papers published in different parts of the world can provide insight into national viewpoints and priorities. The online newspapers below allow for searching by word, phrase, and date.

FBIS Daily Reports
FBIS Daily Reports issued by the U.S. Government. Translations of broadcast and print news as well as government statements from nations around the world. It is used by the CIA as a principal record of political and historical open source intelligence. It covers the time period from 1941-1996. For more recent years see its continuation, World News Connection which ended in 2013.
New York Times
Searchable full text of all New York Times papers from the first issue in 1851 to recent years. Choose Proquest from the Find It menu.
Times Digital Archive
This British newspaper of record began publication in 1785. Haverford has access online from 1985 to the present, but you can search the full time period on the Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore campus.
Washington Post
Provides full text coverage from 1877 to the present.
Historical Jewish Press
Collection of 145 Jewish newspapers full text in their original languages. Sponsored by the National Library of Israel.

Visual Resources

Arab Image Foundation
Images from early 19th century to the present. Register to view and save full-size images:
http://fai.cyberia.net.lb/

ARTstor
A digital library that provides access to thousands of digital images derived from a variety of museum, library and archival collections. Images support a variety of disciplines including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design. Coverage varies.

Matson Photograph Collection
The Library of Congress hosts this collection of over 22 thousand photographs, mostly coming from Palestine (Israel and the West Bank), 1898-1946.
Sources for Historical Photographs of the Middle East
Resource list of archives and museums with digital collections. put together by the Library of Congress.