Constructing ‘history for people:’ Sample Clauses

Constructing ‘history for people:’. The 1950s also witnessed a rising interest in history in the Western world. This, interestingly, fits well into the period when the military/bureaucratic elites of Turkey started to lose their political power. This interest could first be understood in relation to what happened in the Western world during those years. Hobsbawm says that once the gloomy atmosphere of the Second World War was over, many countries, particularly the developing ones, realized that the times were better than the dark days of the past.422 Then, as Lowenthal argues, they started to revisit the past to rebuild their identities while responding to war-related anxieties like dislocation, chaos, absence, loss, and death.423 During this period in Turkey, a new national 419 Sabahattin Sönmez, “Küçük Koç her sabah dükkanının asma kilidini besmeleyle açıyor,” Bütün Dünya, Vol. 9, No. 51, (April 1952), 359. 420 “Zengin Olmanın On Şartı,” Bütün Dünya, Vol. 1. No.2 (March 1948), 199. 421 Dale Carnegie, “Hayır için 750.000.000 dolar dağıtan adam,” Bütün Dünya, Vol. 5, No.24 (January 1950), 24; George Kent, “Lüks otelleri yaratan adam,” Bütün Dünya, Vol. 13, N.o 73 (February 1954), 165; “2000 kat elbisesi olan adam: Elmas Jim,” Bütün Dünya, Vol. 5, No. 25 (February 1950), 146. 422 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), 258. 423 David Lowenthal, “Nostalgia: dreams and nightmares,” The Past is A Foreign Country-Revisited (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 31-64. culture based on academic and non-academic sources about history became popular. This is, of course, related to several social and political transformations mentioned earlier. One may add the death of the ‘Father of the Turks’- Atatürk in 1938, which had the potential to bring about an identity crisis once people failed to find another leader or hero to feel attached to. Also, given the solidification of communism as an international threat, citizens might have sought refuge in a ‘usable’ past to identify themselves. All these, of course, facilitated the birth of alternative historiographies, including the Turkish Islamic Synthesis, in the following decades. In the 1950s, a corpus of daily newspapers, magazines, children’s periodicals, encyclopedias, novels, cartoons, and serialized stories (tefrika) about history emerged.424 As a result of this dynamism, history became a marketable commodity. This was reflected in cinema by increasing the number of films with historical s...