Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, a series of radical reforms were implemented with the objective of establishing a modern state. The nascent republic sought to rapidly elevate the socio-economic status of the nation through comprehensive restructuring across various domains including but not limited to population policies. In tandem with initiatives fostering physical and mental resilience in citizens, the state actively engaged in population planning, pursuing a dual approach to address rampant epidemics while concurrently facilitating population growth. Motivated by a fervor for modernization and pro-natalist policies, the new republic crafted an idealized vision of family in which while children were conceptualized as the future guardians of the nation, necessitating meticulous care and education, women were constructed as bearers and building blocks of robust future generations. This study aims to explore how the discourse of the "modern family," propagated by the ruling elite at the central level, was disseminated, comprehended, and embraced at the local level. The focus will be on the activities and publications generated by the People’s House of Manisa, a provincial city situated in the Western part of Anatolia. This research relies on a discursive analysis of the Gediz Magazine, published by the People’s House of Manisa from 1937 to 1950. As the study demonstrates, the Gediz Magazine constructed the family as a fundamental societal unit, upon which the destiny of the homeland and the nation rested. Consequently, the citizens of Manisa were educated, through articles in the Gediz Magazine and activities organized by the People’s House of Manisa, in the formation of strong families. While instructing citizens on the foundations of building robust families, the authors of Gediz Magazine frequently delved into discussions on marriage, child-rearing, education, and the roles that women should assume. Although there is a limited body of research on the People’s House of Manisa and the Gediz Magazin, existing scholarship lacks a focus on how the concerns of the new regime regarding family, children, and women permeated the local level. To broaden the scope of political and socio-cultural historiography of the early Republican Period in Turkey, it is beneficial to analyze the activities of the People’s Houses and their primary publications in conjunction with the local context in which they operated. This endeavor sheds light on how the sweeping reforms of the single-party period were disseminated, comprehended, and negotiated in various towns situated far from the center.

The 1929 crisis and the consequent economic policies wreaked havoc on the agricultural sector and cultivators’ living standards in Turkey, and the following dispossession process brought about discontent that became apparent with the emergence of the Free Republican Party (FRP) in 1930. The brutal repression of the widespread support for the FRP in the public meetings and the elections and, lastly, the closure of the FRP was the reflexes of the ruling cadre leading to a return to the Republican People’s Party (RPP) ’s authoritarian single-party regime. In addition, the RPP officially adopted statism as the economic policy in the 1931 Party Congress. While the establishment of the authoritarian single-party regime has been analyzed as the imposition of a rule in a top-down manner, the development of statism has been discussed as an example of good decision-making of the ruling cadre. Besides, the literature has focused mainly on either policy-making at the top of the state or the economic conditions and discontent at the societal level. Even though the close relationship between widespread discontent following the economic crisis in 1930 and upcoming policy formation has been mentioned, it has yet to be studied in depth. To fully understand the development of these policies, it is necessary to reckon the state formation, policy making, and social conditions as the forms of the same underlying social relations and analyze them in their unity. Therefore, this paper aims to answer how the authoritarian single-party rule and statism converged in 1930s Turkey in and through contradictory and conflicting social relations. The answer requires archival research that would enable the identification of the demands raised by the cultivators and expose the formation of statist economic policies and authoritarian single-party regime through process tracing. Based on the archival documents, namely the RPP’s provincial congresses’ wish lists, the records of Mustafa Kemal’s journey in the country after the closure of the FRP, parliamentary minutes, and newspapers, I argue that statism and authoritarian single-party rule developed as confluent tendencies in tandem in response to the popular discontent that became apparent in the FRP experience. That is to say; the ruling cadre reframed the contradictory and conflicting relations in its interaction with the dissidents, specifically the cultivators, which ranged from oppression with violence, collecting demands, and developing policy that promised to integrate the demands of different social classes in the regime.

The legacy of Turkish journalist Zekeriya Sertel (1890-1980) is often overshadowed by that of his wife, Sabiha Sertel, a notable leftist, considered by some to be the first female journalist of the Turkish Republic. Zekeriya was peripheral to centers of power at several notable moments in Republican history. The son of an agha in the Balkans, he experienced both wealth and privilege but also the violence and displacement at the end of the Ottoman Empire. From his involvement as Directorate General of the Press in the early republic to his complicated involvement with the Communist Party of Turkey during the Cold War as a close friend and collaborator of the poet Nazim Hikmet, he served, often with significant friction, several masters. I am developing this paper as part of a larger project on Zekeriya Sertel. I hope to use this to think through educational and social “formation” in the context of violent political change and cultural anomie between empire and republic. Using a transnational microhistory approach, this paper utilizes memoirs and other ego documents to chart and examine Sertel’s migrations on the eve of the Balkan Wars, his studies at the Sorbonne during the Great War, and his Crane scholarship to Columbia during the Turkish War of Independence. After several decades of discussion about the “deep-rootedness” of the Kemalist project and current questions about the future of Turkish secularism, I think it is worthwhile to reevaluate the elites that formed Mustafa Kemal’s cohort. What did they believe they were being cultivated for? How did they envision the future? And what can the fallout between a young press minister and the nascent Kemalist government tell us about the dynamics of political involvement in the 1920s? There does not appear to be any works in English that focus on Zekeriya Sertel. However, there is a recent English-language translation of his wife Sabiha Sertel’s memoirs Roman Gibi. Thus, this project will be original research on a notable Turkish media figure but will also help address questions related to the republic's formation.

Fires have historically held significant importance in Istanbul. With the establishment and subsequent improvement of the modern fire brigade during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, fires transitioned from catastrophic disasters to manageable incidents. Nevertheless, fire-ravaged areas remained on the agenda for urbanites and decision-makers alike until the second half of the twentieth century. The reconstruction of these spaces, a subject of public discourse and urban planning, also represented a quest for solutions to a social problem. Despite the devastation of fire-damaged areas, these spaces were far from vacant or stagnant. Instead, they were inhabited or temporarily utilized by "undesirable" social groups existing on the fringes of society. Such groups included prostitutes (often indirectly associated with syphilis), beggars, alcoholics, and individuals afflicted with tuberculosis. They were alternately stigmatized by both criminalization and medical marginalization and labeled as degenerates. Their presence in the urban landscape contributed to feelings of fear and unease. Notably, fire-ravaged areas became more active at night, coinciding with disruptions in order and perceived increases in crime rates. Consequently, these urban users were interpreted as social groups requiring control by the authorities. This study explores the everyday lives of the inhabitants in Istanbul's scattered, fire-stricken spaces. It seeks to investigate the dialogues spurred by Istanbul's modernization process, the responses of city dwellers, and the quotidian experiences of the "undesirable" groups, incorporating perspectives from decision-makers and authorities, ordinary citizens, and marginalized groups utilizing these spaces temporarily or long-term.

The towering, barbed security walls of the current NATO’s Allied Land Command Headquarters in Şirinyer, Izmir (Turkey), shield a cluster of early-twentieth-century buildings. Although repurposed and integrated into the modern military landscape, these buildings retain their original historicist facades to this day. Among them, three grand white edifices, elegantly blending collegiate gothic and classical elements, stand out. Once the cornerstones of an American college with missionary roots, known as the International College of Smyrna, they serve as a poignant reminder of the site's educational legacy. Initially established in 1891 in the Armenian quarter of Izmir/Smyrna, the College outgrew its original location within only two decades of operations, and in 1913, on the eve of WWI, moved to a purpose-built suburban campus that offered expanded educational and boarding facilities. This paper draws on sources from Ottoman, Turkish and American archives to delve into the intricate and layered history of this campus, which, over a brief span of four decades, underwent three significant conversions: first, from productive agrarian grounds known as Paradiso to a non-sectarian American college within the multicultural Ottoman empire; next, in 1937, to the Kızılçullu Village Institute to support the Early Turkish Republic’s rural development project; and finally, in 1952, to NATO’s regional headquarters upon Turkey ‘s formal admission to the organization. The site’s change of hands, accompanied by concurrent changes in place names (Paradiso, Kızılçullu and Şirinyer) undoubtedly mirrors the transition from imperial to national to Cold War statehood. However, rather than interpreting the site solely through the lens of profound ideological ruptures within the Ottoman/Turkish context, as is commonly done, this paper probes the site's remarkable longevity and the resilience of its infrastructure despite turbulent political transitions. It traces a series of transnational pedagogical and curricular exchanges, as well as symbolic legacies, that interconnected these seemingly discrete institutions long after their original purposes had dissolved. Like a historical palimpsest, the pedagogical traces left by one institution transpired through the material infrastructure, influencing future initiatives on the same site. Employing a combination of approaches, including “global microhistory”, “site biography”, and “thick description”, the paper ultimately reveals interactions and transactions that have been obscured by an exclusive focus on national boundaries and narratives.