Winner of the 2019 Booklife Prize by Publishers Weekly.Construction of the nation’s massive Interstate Highway System is underway, tearing north through the Connecticut River Valley. In its path sits the Vermont hill farm that Roland Tuttle’s ancestors settled generations ago, where Roland has spent his entire life—caring for his animals, plowing with horses, harvesting by hand. Exit 8 tells Roland’s place in the Tuttle family’s history. It is a story of personal choice, nature’s d...

Focussing on events in the Anatolian town of Tokat during the final two decades of the great Ottoman legal and administrative reforms known as the Tanzimat (1839-76), this book applies elements of social networking theory to analyze and assess the establishment of local governments across the Middle East.The author’s key finding is that the state’s efforts to centralize authority succeeded only when and where locals acted as the primary agents of change. Independent notables, such ...

The Nobel Prize winner and one of today's most prominent contemporary Turkish writers delivers a novel that is a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, a brilliant symposium on the power of art, and a “modern classic … rich and essential” (Los Angeles Times Book Review)—set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul.The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book ...

Born in London to a Turkish mother and British father, Alev Scott moved to Istanbul to discover what it means to be Turkish in a country going through rapid political and social change, with an extraordinary past still linked to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and an ever more surprising present under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.From the European buzz of modern-day Constantinople to the Arabic-speaking towns of the south-east, Turkish Awakening investigates mass migration...

A gripping exploration of the fall of Constantinople and its connection to the world we live in today.The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history and the end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley's comprehensive account of the battle between Mehmet II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Constantine XI, the 57th emperor of Byzantium, illuminates the period in history that was a precursor to the current conflict between the West and the Middle East...

Constantinople, the Turkish capital, the mysterious, ancient, ever-flourishing city, sacred alike to Christian and Mahometan, stands in its wondrous beauty upon European shores; yet Turkey is an Asiatic State. Her story belongs to Asia, the world of dreamy fancy and lurid legend, not of sober fact and accurately dated history. Hence one can speak of Turkey only after the fashion of her own clime, repeating the poetic fantasies with which her writers have adorned her early days, enjoying th...

Keen to learn but short on time? Get to grips with the events of the Fall of Constantinople in next to no time with this concise guide.50Minutes.com provides a clear and engaging analysis of the Fall of Constantinople. In May 1453, Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottomans after a 53-day siege. This conquest marked the end of the mighty Roman Empire and a key point in the Ottoman advance to the West. The collapse of the Byzantine Emp...

With its varied and glorious history, Istanbul remains one of the world’s perennially fascinating cities. Richard Tillinghast, who first visited Istanbul in the early 1960s and has watched it transform over the decades into a vibrant metropolis, explores its rich art and architecture, culture, cuisine, and much more in this book.Istanbul was known in Byzantine times as the “Queen of Cities” and to the Ottoman Turks as the “Abode of Felicity.” Steeped in Istanbul’s history, Tillingh...

Employing rigorous analysis and lively narrative alongside specially commissioned artwork, this study casts new light on the rivalry between two vessels of war in the Mediterranean.For four hundred years the Byzantine Empire's naval forces vied with the warships of the Islamic world for mastery of the Mediterranean. At the heart of this confrontation were the fighting vessels of the two powers, the Byzantine dromon and the Arabic shalandi, both oared warships. In t...

The grand narrative of "The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building" is that of the essential continuity of the late Ottoman Empire with the Republic of Turkey that was founded in 1923. Erik J. Zurcher shows that Kemal's 'ideological toolkit', which included positivism, militarism, nationalism and a state-centred world view, was shared by many other Young Turks. Authoritarian rule, a one-party state, a legal framework based on European principles, advanced European-style bureaucracy, financi...

The nineteenth century was, for many societies, a period of coming to grips with the growing, and seemingly unstoppable, domination of the world by the “Great Powers” of Europe. The Ottoman Empire was no exception: Ottomans from all walks of life—elite and non-elite, Muslim and non-Muslim—debated the reasons for what they considered to be the Ottoman decline and European ascendance. One of the most popular explanations was deceptively simple: science. If the Ottomans would adopt the new sc...

Too often, when examining the history of Jews during the Ottoman period, schlars focus solely on the founding of Israel after World War II and the victimization of Palestinians. But its important to look at every dimension of Jewish life during this time. Ali Arslan, Ph.D., takes a broad view of Jewish/Ottoman history in this academic work, beginning with how the Jews of Western Europe were forced to leave the Ibeian Peninsula and found the Ottomans waiting for them with welcoming arms. Th...