The history books I most enjoy are those that tell me about events of which I knew little or nothing, and want to learn more.
One such event was the fall of Smyrna (now Izmir) in western Turkey in 1922. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, Greek troops occupied the multicultural city of Smyrna. After three years, Turkish nationalist forces led by Kemal Ataturk forces re-entered the city, setting its buildings on fire and killing up to 100,000 of its Greek, Armenian, and other inhabitants in an act of what is now called ethnic cleansing.
Giles Milton recalls this horrific tragedy, focusing on the cosmopolitan merchants who had made their wealth there as well as on the many poor people who lost their lives or fled into exile.
On Saturday 9th September, 1922, the victorious Turkish cavalry rode into Smyrna, the richest and most cosmopolitan city in the Ottoman Empire. What happened over the next two weeks must rank as one of the most compelling human dramas of the twentieth century. Almost two million people were caught up in a disaster of truly epic proportions.
PARADISE LOST is told with the narrative verve that has made Giles Milton a bestselling historian. It unfolds through the memories of the survivors, many of them interviewed for the first time, and the eyewitness accounts of those who found themselves caught up…
Errick Nunnally was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and served one tour in the Marine Corps before deciding art school was a safer pursuit. He enjoys art, comics, and genre novels. A graphic designer, he has trained in Krav Maga and Muay Thai kickboxing. His work has appeared in several anthologies of speculative fiction. His work can be found in Apex Magazine, Fiyah Magazine, Galaxy’s Edge, Lamplight, Nightlight Podcast, and the novels, Lightning Wears a Red Cape, Blood for the Sun, and All the Dead Men.
Here is a book about history that is horrific, often referenced, and not as fully understood as it should be. It’s about entire towns erased from existence or whole segments of a population violently displaced in one night. Full of terrifying tales, the author began looking into the subject thinking there’d be several historical incidents and instead found too many to include in the book. It is a harrowing accounting of racial cleansing right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. and a potent reminder of how this country operated well into the twentieth century. Again, this sort of thing is good background to inform my character’s current attitude and makes for ripe pickings in flashbacks or background stories.
Leave now, or die!" Those words-or ones just as ominous-have echoed through the past hundred years of American history, heralding a very unnatural disaster-a wave of racial cleansing that wiped out or drove away black populations from counties across the nation. While we have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, this story of racial cleansing has remained almost entirely unknown. These expulsions, always swift and often violent, were extraordinarily widespread in the period between Reconstruction and the Depression era. In the heart of the Midwest and the Deep South, whites rose up in rage, fear, and…
As a refugee myself, I was attracted to read about the lives and experiences of other refugees, not merely those from my own community or background, but especially those from other backgrounds–which is probably reflected in the books that I’ve chosen for my list.
Set in former Yugoslavia, this powerful novel follows a girl whose only chance of survival is to escape war and rebuild a life elsewhere.
I found the way the author tells this story beautiful, even though the story is tragic, and describes the complexities of civil strife as well as their impact on ordinary people living in a country that is now split into Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia.
“Fiction does give you a capacity for empathy,” says the author. It should–and I found that this one does.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016
Growing up in Zagreb in the summer of 1991, 10-year-old Ana Juric is a carefree tomboy; she runs the streets with her best friend, Luka, helps take care of her baby sister, Rahela, and idolizes her father. But when civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, football games and school lessons are supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills.
The brutal ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosnians tragically changes Ana's life, and she is lost to a world of genocide and child soldiers; a daring escape plan to America becomes her…
Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
There is no way of understanding the Palestinian catastrophe without understanding the role of Zionism as an ideology and praxis in bringing it about. This book is the first methodic analysis of how Zionist ideology from the very beginning of the Zionist project prepared the ground for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
