Ottomania and the Armenian Genocide in World History Curriculum

BY GEORGE DALBO and KIPPER BROMIA
From the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies

“Do high school students in the United States learn about the Armenian Genocide?”

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. K-12 education in the United States is highly decentralized and localized, with decisions about what is taught and learned made by districts, schools, or, most often, individual teachers at the classroom level. Some state-level surveys of genocide education have been conducted, but the variability of curricula among schools and the high rate of teacher turnover make it challenging to draw meaningful conclusions. While Holocaust education has become a mainstay of American curricula for decades, education about so-called “other genocides,” including the Armenian Genocide, is still much less common.

A colleague reminded me that high school teachers cannot reasonably be expected to know everything. “It’s not that I’m purposefully not teaching it. I was never taught about the Armenian Genocide, and so I don’t include it in my class,” he said. A 2015 survey of American adults revealed that only 35 percent had any knowledge of the Armenian Genocide. However, compounding this lack of knowledge are two trends that have come to shape academic research and social awareness of the Armenian Genocide in the US: (a) Distortion and denial of the genocide and (b) Neo-Ottomanism and Ottoman nostalgia. These trends shape what American high school students learn in World History classes, especially Advanced Placement World History.

Denial and Distortion
The Turkish and Azerbaijani governments, primary deniers and distorters of the Armenian Genocide, have long attempted to shape narratives of violence perpetrated against Armenians. While there are instances of outright denial of the genocide, narratives that distort or minimize the violence are more common, especially those that minimize the number of Armenians murdered in the genocide. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote: “Turkey does not deny the suffering of Armenians, including the loss of many innocent lives, during the First World War. However, greater numbers of Turks died or were killed in the years leading to and during the War. Without belittling the tragic consequences for any group, Turkey objects to the one-sided presentation of this tragedy as a genocide by one group against another.”

Another subtler tactic is the representation of the Ottoman Empire as one of tolerance and ethnic and religious diversity. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote against narratives of violence and genocide, stating: “As a consequence, eight centuries of Turkish-Armenian relationship, which was predominantly about friendship, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, is forgotten.” This focus on tolerance and diversity, often minimizing or omitting any mention of ethnic or religious conflict or violence within the Ottoman Empire, is a form of Neo-Ottomanism and has been termed Ottoman Nostalgia.

Ottoman Nostalgia
Neo-Ottomanism is a political ideology that seeks to promote Turkish political and economic influence over the former lands of the Ottoman Empire. Neo-Ottomanism often relies on Ottoman nostalgia, which promotes a narrative of the Ottoman Empire as diverse and tolerant of the various ethnic, religious, and cultural groups that once lived under its rule. While true to a degree – for example, the Ottoman Millet system granted non-Muslim Abrahamic religious communities, including Armenians, a degree of autonomy and self-rule – this narrative, especially when shared uncritically, minimized the ethnic and religious violence in the Ottoman Empire. These two trends – distortion and, especially, Ottoman nostalgia – can be clearly identified in US high school world history curricula.

World History Curricula
Roger Back et al.’s “World History Patterns of Interaction” (first published in 1998) is one of the most popular high school-level world history textbooks in the United States. In fact, if you took a world history course in the US in the last 30 years, there is a good chance you encountered this text. The current (2010) edition only mentions the Armenian Genocide (referring to it as the “Armenian Massacre” in a call-out box in the margins of the chapter on World War I. The three-sentence-long text box also states that “more than 600,000 died of starvation or were killed,” when many academics put the number of deaths between 1 and 1.5 million.

While texts like Beck et al.’s minimize the Armenian Genocide, Ottoman Nostalgia can be clearly seen in the formal and informal Advanced Placement World History curricula.

Advanced Placement World History
While there is no national curriculum in the United States, there are curricula that are used across the country, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses. AP courses, created by the College Board, a division of the Educational Testing Service, are meant to be college-level courses taught by high school teachers. Students may earn college credit based on their score on a comprehensive end-of-course exam. In 2024, 11 percent of all American high school students took the AP World History: Modern exam. As much as 10 percent more may have enrolled in APWH courses but did not sit for the exam. Additionally, in many schools, APWH curriculum influences non-AP world history classes.

Formal and informal APWH’s curriculum includes: (a) the “Course and Exam Description” (CED), which lists the skills and content that must be covered in the course; (b) AP-recommended textbooks and exam preparation guides, and (c) teacher-created resources.

The CED includes teaching and learning about “Genocide, ethnic violence, or attempted destruction of specific populations,” including “Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I,” as one of several illustrative examples. In contrast, the Ottoman Empire is mentioned 32 times in the document, and highlighted for its diversity and inclusiveness: “Many states, such as the Mughal and Ottoman empires, adopted practices to accommodate the ethnic and religious diversity of their subjects or utilize the economic, political, and military contributions of different ethnic or religious groups.”

Textbooks
Jerry Bentley et al.’s “Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past”, a textbook recommended for APWH students, includes “Armenian Massacres” in the glossary, while in the text, it offers credence to Turkish distortion and denialism, writing: “The Turkish government in particular rejects the label of genocide and claims the Armenian deaths resulted not from a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination but from communal warfare perpetrated by Christians and Muslims, disease, and famine.”

Teacher-Created Materials and Professional Development
Perhaps most telling is a Facebook Group, “AP World History Teachers,” with nearly 9,000 members, in which educators share resources, professional development opportunities, and discuss topics related to the course. In a post, a teacher reflected: “I did a 3 week NEH seminar on the Ottomans in Turkey back in 2013. They really ARE all that.”

Many posts within the group highlight Ottoman nostalgia. One particular post for an upcoming teacher-facilitated professional development workshop stated: “Just a reminder that TONIGHT I’m offering another free workshop! It’s at 7PM ET/ 4PM PT, I’ll discuss how we teach an empire that started as a small medieval state around 1300 and lasted until 1922. I’ll focus on how we can help students understand the Ottoman Empire as a dynamic state that continually evolved and was an ethnically and religiously diverse state.”

A teacher-created presentation on the Ottoman Empire included a focus on Pax Ottomana, or a “More positive view of Ottoman rule/expansion,” as well as a slide on the “M&M’s” of the Ottoman Empire, including the millet system. While using a lighthearted shorthand for students is an effective tool, it reduces history to a few keywords and scrubs it clean of any nuance.

Teacher-created materials reflect a wide range of influences, including personal reading and professional development. However, given the teach-to-the-test nature of APWH, many materials follow the narrative of the CED and minimize the Armenian Genocide while highlighting Ottoman nostalgia.

Conclusion
Highlighting narratives of diversity and tolerance while minimizing violent pasts is certainly not isolated to Turkish/Ottoman history. Indeed, such narratives would be very familiar to many American teachers who were often educated within a system that promoted similar narratives about the United States. Reducing history into a nice narrative or a marketable product ultimately does the students learning about it a disservice. Likewise, Ottoman nostalgia is part of a larger liberal discourse of multiculturalism that subsumes and minimizes ethnic, religious, or racial violence by the state.

However, Ottoman nostalgia may be more difficult for American educators, even critically-minded ones, to discern and challenge in their classrooms. In the post-9/11 era, many critical social studies educators sought to provide students with knowledge about Islam and narratives of Islamic states that countered those that framed all Muslims as terrorists. For many social studies educators, simply teaching about the Ottoman Empire, something they likely learned little about in their own education, is a critical stance. While highlighting for students the tolerance and religious and ethnic diversity of the Ottoman Empire does seemingly little harm, such framing is often part of a larger narrative that also minimizes or denies the Armenian Genocide.

George Dalbo is an Assistant Professor of Education and Youth Studies at Beloit College and a Research Fellow with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. Previously, George was a middle and high school social studies teacher. 

Kipper Bromia is a student at Beloit College majoring in sociology with an interest in how social systems affect individual people and relationships that they have with each other. Kipper also has an interest in animal behavior and welfare, and the relationships that animals and ecosystems have with humans.