O College dear, we praise thee
For pointing to the stars
With faith and hope unswerving
Which no weak vision mars
Thy service unrestricted
By race or class or creed;
Thy love so freely offered,
Its only claim-our need.
-Anthem of the American College for Girls, Istanbul

Halide Edib (1883-1964) was one of modern Turkey's most celebrated women. Author, feminist, nationalist, modernist, educator, and member of the National Assembly, she identified her person and career with the transformation of Turkey into a modern secular republic. Educated in the internationalist spirit of the American College for Girls in Istanbul, she was, throughout her life, a cosmopolitan intellectual with an international audience. Edib's personal transition from Ottoman society to the new nationalist elite, and her homeland's transition from empire to republic, posed no insurmountable historical, social, and cultural discontinuities; hers was a nationalism that, although grounded in Western notions of emancipation and self-determination, asserted with confidence its distinct identity and autonomy from the West.

For a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century, venturing into the Armenian crisis is like venturing into a minefield. It is fraught with dangers, the least of which is to be labeled a traitor by one's countrymen, and the worst of which is to be accused of being a “denialist” by one's Armenian colleagues. Even “balanced” analysis seems to have become politically incorrect of late, at least in some circles. The basic problem in the Armenian-Turkish polemic is that the sides do not actually address each other. They seize upon various capsule phrases, clichés and assumed political positions to heap opprobrium and abuse upon one another, to the point where we are confronted by something resembling a blood-feud. Thus Richard Hovanissian's obsession is to have the “Turkish side” admit, in a great ceremony of mea culpa, the claim of Genocide. On the other hand, Turkish historians and their like-minded foreign colleagues, at best, do contortionist acts to show that what happened to the Armenian people in 1915 does not fit the UN definition of genocide, which was fashioned after the Second World War to account for the Jewish Holocaust.

Since the mid-1990s we have been witnessing the emergence of a “new Turkish cinema.” A number of young directors, among them Zeki Demirkubuz, Derviş Zaim, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Serdar Akar, and Nuri Bilge Ceyhan, made their first feature films during this period and have proved to be quite prolific since then. Acclaimed by critics in Turkey and abroad, recent Turkish films have received invitations from major international festivals and have won prestigious awards. The new Turkish cinema has also generated its own brand of audience. While Turkish films had largely disappeared from theaters for most of the 1980s due to severe economic adversities in the film industry, local viewers had, in any case, distanced themselves from Turkish cinema on the grounds of its presumed “banality,” the term “Turkish film” having become almost synonymous with “bad taste” for a decade prior to the arrival of the new Turkish cinema. Since the 1990s, however, Turkish films have once again begun to attract audiences to theaters, signaling that the long lost reputation of Turkish cinema may have been restored.

In the past decade there has been a resurgence of studies in the social sciences that emphasize the role of “the social” in market exchange and economic development. This is a welcome change from the “asocial” homo economicus of neoclassical theory and finds various expressions, most notable among them being studies on social capital, trust, and networks. Simplified, the argument is that men and women do not enter into economic transactions in a social vacuum; rather, their community ties, their face-to-face relations, and their networks of such relations facilitate gainful exchange and may ultimately contribute to successful economic development in a country or region.

The Tanzimat reform period, initiated with the Gülhane edict of 1839 and continuing up until the Ottoman-Russian war of 1876, was an important stage in the reorganization of the provincial administration of the Ottoman Empire. In order to increase state control, the modernizing and centralizing Tanzimat reforms addressed several areas of administration including the formation of a central bureaucracy, regulation of tax collection, and the pursuit of social and economic development in the Ottoman provinces.