Search the Kreitzberg Library
Search our books and ebooks, as well as some of our most popular full-text article databases.
Online Primary Source Collections
- Adbul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress This monumental collection portrays the Ottoman Empire during the reign of one of its last sultans, Abdul-Hamid II. The 1,819 photographs in 51 large-format albums date from about 1880 to 1893. They highlight the modernization of numerous aspects of the Ottoman Empire, featuring images of educational facilities and students; well-equipped army and navy personnel and facilities; technologically advanced lifesaving and fire fighting brigades; factories; mines; harbors; hospitals; and government buildings. Most of the places depicted are within the boundaries of modern-day Turkey, but buildings and sites in Iraq, Lebanon, Greece and other countries are also included
- Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative Folklore, epics, and narratives of Turkish literature. In English, translated by native Turkish speakers. From Texas Tech University.
- Children and Youth in History: Ottoman Decree, 1856 Context and an excerpt from the Islahat Fermani Decree introducing reforms to the education system in the Ottoman Empire.
- Historical Maps of the Middle East Historical maps from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas. Scroll down to view maps of the Ottoman Empire from 1481-1683 and from 1683-1923.
- History of Turkey: Primary Documents Includes treaties, travel accounts, the Ottoman Constitution (1876), and photographs.
- Islamic Architecture of the Middle East Videos from the Victoria and Albert Museum including videos about the Topkapi Palace and the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul.
- Portraits from the Empire, 1650-1910 An art exhibit by the Pera Museum and Google Cultural Institute.
- The Unread Masterpiece of Evliya Celebi An article with excerpts from Çelebi's Book of Travels. From Saudi Aramco World. By Louis Werner, March/April 2011.
Finding Eyewitness Accounts
These are keywords for locating primary sources in both Google and the library catalog.
For example, if you want letters from soldiers in WWII, you would type:
correspondence (for letters)
AND
"world war II" OR "World War, 1939-1945"
(remember to put 2+ word phrases in quotation marks")
- Sources or documents - for general primary sources (examples: medieval sources, civil war documents, papal sources)
- Personal narratives, autobiography or memoir (examples: Pearl Harbor personal narratives, battle of the bulge memoir, autobiography world war II)
- Correspondence or letters (examples: Civil War correspondence, French revolution letters)
- Diary (examples: Civil War diary, woman diary early modern france)
- Interview, oral history or speeches (examples: Cold War interview, Japanese internment oral history, Malcolm X speeches)
- Pamphlet (examples: pamphlet chastity, women rights pamphlet)
- Pictorial works - for photographs or artwork (examples: Vietnam pictorial works)
Other Primary Source Topic Ideas
Among the Ottomans: Diaries from Turkey in World War I by
During World War One, the Ottoman Empire, one of the largest and longest-lasting empires in history, faced severe challenges to its structure and existence, which eventually resulted in its dissolution. 'Among The Ottomans' introduces two unique diary accounts written by two generations of the same family in the declining years of the Ottoman Empire.Written in the heart of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, Marie Lyster's World War One diaries describe the political and social climate of Constantinople as Allied troops swept through Turkey, wreaking havoc on the country's infrastructure and forcing residents, regardless of their national affiliations, to endure the hardships of war. Just 200 miles away in the Dardanelles, her son Henry was fighting with the Allies against the Turks. Following the Allied retreat in 1915, he was posted to Salonika in northern Greece, where he worked with the 'Comitajis' as they fought the Bulgarians. Later, as the Military Governor of Eastern Thrace, he witnessed the rise of Turkish Nationalism and the struggle for control of the fragmented pieces of the fallen empire. Published for the first time, these two diaries provide an unprecedented account of the Great War's impact across generations and geographical borders and a unique insight into the final years of the Ottoman Empire.
Call Number: E-Book (available online)
Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution by
This vividly detailed revisionist history opens a new vista on the great Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, a key period often seen as the eve of Tanzimat westernizing reforms and the beginning of three distinct histories--ethnic nationalism in the Balkans, imperial modernization from Istanbul, and European colonialism in the Middle East. Christine Philliou brilliantly shines a new light on imperial crisis and change in the 1820s and 1830s by unearthing the life of one man. Stephanos Vogorides (1780-1859) was part of a network of Christian elites known phanariots, institutionally excluded from power yet intimately bound up with Ottoman governance. By tracing the contours of the wide-ranging networks--crossing ethnic, religious, and institutional boundaries--in which the phanariots moved, Philliou provides a unique view of Ottoman power and, ultimately, of the Ottoman legacies in the Middle East and Balkans today. What emerges is a wide-angled analysis of governance as a lived experience at a moment in which there was no clear blueprint for power.
Call Number: E-Book (available online)ISBN: 9780520947757
Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire by
Possessors and Possessed analyzes how and why museums--characteristically Western institutions--emerged in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Shaw argues that, rather than directly emulating post-Enlightenment museums of Western Europe, Ottoman elites produced categories of collection and modes of display appropriate to framing a new identity for the empire in the modern era. In contrast to late-nineteenth-century Euro-American museums, which utilized organizational schema based on positivist notions of progress to organize exhibits of fine arts, Ottoman museums featured military spoils and antiquities long before they turned to the "Islamic" collections with which they might have been more readily associated. The development of these various modes of collection reflected shifting moments in Ottoman identity production. Shaw shows how Ottoman museums were able to use collection and exhibition as devices with which to weave counter-colonial narratives of identity for the Ottoman Empire. Impressive for both the scope and the depth of its research, Possessors and Possessed lays the groundwork for future inquiries into the development of museums outside of the Euro-American milieu.
Call Number: E-Book (available online)Vetluga Memoir: Turkish prisoner of war in Russia, 1916-1918 by
Call Number: E-Book (available online)ISBN: 058517816X
Year of the Locust: A Soldier's Diary and the Erasure of Palestine's Ottoman Past by
Year of the Locust captures in page-turning detail 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. There he occupied himself by dreaming about his future and using family connections to avoid being sent to the Suez. His diaries draw a unique picture of daily life in the besieged city, bringing into sharp focus its communitarian alleys and obliterated neighborhoods, the ongoing political debates, and, most vividly, the voices from its streets--soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds. Salim Tamari's indispensable introduction places the diary in its local, regional, and imperial contexts while deftly revising conventional wisdom on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
Call Number: E-Book (available online)
