The Ottoman period occupies an important place in the work of Jordanian historians since the 1970s. While the Kingdom’s official history narrative builds upon the legacy of the Great Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule, narratives that have emerged in the work of Jordanian historians are much more complex. Focusing on the local scale, this historiographic production simultaneously points to the horizon of the Bilad al-Sham as an indispensable context. An analysis of the publications of the Committee for the History of the Bilad al-Sham (uniting the University of Jordan, the University of Yarmouk and the University of Damascus) reveals an implicit challenge to “methodological nationalism” (Gary Wilder 2015) as the committee’s scope of work itself defies national borders. It also speaks to the larger political context of this scholarship in the aftermath of the 1967 war. In this presentation I will compare this historiography with oral history narratives collected by a group of Jordanian students in various parts of the country between 2018 and 2020, many of which concern the final decade of Ottoman rule in Jordan. They reveal important differences in the way the populations of various regions experienced that tumultuous period. What can we learn about Jordanian society when we approach historiographic works and oral history narratives together as ways of situating oneself in time, in the spirit of François Hartog’s regimes of historicity (articulations of past, present and future), and what does this add to our understanding of the legacy of the Ottoman empire?