Studies in Atatürk's Turkey

George Sellers Harris & Nur Bilge Criss

Language: English

Publisher: Brill

Published: Jun 29, 2009

Description:

Drawing on hitherto untapped diplomats' memoirs, journalistic accounts, and U.S. State Department records, this book offers a new reading of U.S.-Turkey relations from the 1920s and 1930s. Original sources are what make this book authentic.

From the Back Cover

Nearly all of the previous scholarship on Turkey and U.S. relations cover the Cold War period as well as current affairs with regard to security, strategy, and defense. Hence, the literature abounds with military orientation. This edited volume builds on a historical perspective and focuses on foreign relations, diplomacy, actors, mutual perceptions and reciprocity in diplomatic relations within the framework of the world conjuncture in the 1920s and 1930s. Relations with the U.S.A. have served as a balance in Turkey's Euro-Atlantic policy long before NATO was established. Likewise, re-building relations with the Republic of Turkey served U.S. interests in opening to the Near East and thus breaking away from its much lauded isolationist policy between the two world wars. Thus, the picture that emerges here is just as much a history of U.S. diplomacy as it is of Turkey.

About the Author

George S. Harris , Ph.D. in History, Harvard University, retired in 1995 as Director of the Office of Analysis for Near East and South Asia in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the Department of State. Among his publications are Troubled Alliance: Turkish-American Problems in Historical Perspective, 1945-1971 , The Communists and the Kadro Movement: Shaping Ideology in Atatürk's Turkey. Nur Bilge Criss , Ph.D. (1990) in History, George Washington University, is currently teaching at Bilkent University, Department of International Relations in Ankara, Turkey. Among her publications are Atatürk's Legacy: A Worldview in Historical Context, Istanbul Under Allied Occupation, 1918-1923 , and Strategic Nuclear Missiles in Turkey: the Jupiter Affair, 1959-1963. Contributors include: Suhnaz Yilmaz, Seçil Karal Akgün, Howard A. Reed, Nur Bilge Criss, and George S. Harris.