The scene is Turkey in the mid-to-late Seventies. A young male college student hops onto a bus. He sits next to a cute female student from his class, but before they can strike up a conversation, they see a right-wing passenger, walk up to another passenger and hit him on the head with a hammer. The young woman screams. The two students get off the bus, only ... Show More
Yesterday
James Bultema, "Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016" (Springer, 2026)
In Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016 (Springer Nature, 2026), James Bultema identifies and investigates four central factors that gave rise to the Turkish Protestant movement in the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twen ... Show More
1 h
Apr 19
Nathaniel Greenberg, "The Long War of Ideas: American Public Diplomacy in Arabic After 9/11" (Columbia UP, 2026)
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-la ... Show More
48m 38s
Apr 19
Sabri Jiryis, "The Foundations of Zionism" (Ebb Books, 2025)
Translated into English for the first time since its original publication by the PLO's Palestine Research Center, this book extensively details the origins of Zionism and its development as an ideology and political project that has wrought havoc in the Middle East and beyond ove ... Show More
52m 7s
Jun 2021
Christine Philliou on reimagining Turkish history and the roots of political dissent
Christine Philliou, associate professor of history at UC Berkeley, on “Turkey: A Past Against History” (University of California Press). The book examines the life of the writer Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965), interrogating the shifting meaning of political dissent from Ottoman to ... Show More
42m 15s
Feb 2021
Turkey: Adnan Menderes, populism, and history
Turkey and 50s Prime Minister Menderes, Erdogan today, and how history is used for political power. Matthew Sweet is joined by Jeremy Seal, Ece Temelkuran, Michael Talbot & Nilay Ozlu.Before his execution in 1961, the Turkish prime minister Adnan Menderes saw Turkey admitted to N ... Show More
45m 4s
Nov 2023
Violence, Nonviolence & the Palestinian National Movement | Wendy Pearlman
<p>Peace processes, two-state vs one-state solutions and nonviolent protests. In conversation with Professor Wendy Pearlman from Northwestern University, we take two of her books as a foundation to examine grassroots activism historically and to consider a potential future “just” ... Show More
1h 3m
Jun 2019
Jennifer Dixon, "Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan" (Cornell UP, 2018)
Jennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), investigates the Japanese and Turkish states’ narratives of their “dark pasts,” the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) and Armenian Genocide (1915-17), respectively. The official ... Show More
1h 2m