Shifting away from other scholarly work where “ordinary” members of society (such as women) commit acts of genocide, the second historiography I will engage looks at the debates in determining the catalysts for the genocide. Two main fields emerged since the 2007 International Association of Genocide Scholars decision, that recognized the deaths committed by the Young Turk regime as genocide. The first argues that primary evidence supports the state-sponsored killing of the Armenians as evidence of genocide; while the second, (mostly Turkish scholars) say that a state civil war caused the Armenians deaths.
The scholars I will focus on, however, question the proximate cause of the genocide within the Ottoman Empire. These historians reveal…show more content… For historians studying the Armenian genocide and its causes, government documents such as eyewitness accounts and correspondence between departments to determine the intent of the State to destroy the Armenian population. To investigate women’s involvement in the genocide process, my sources for this project will rely heavily on oral histories. Fortunately, there is a rich oral history collection from Armenian survivors that previous authors have preserved. These histories are essential for my research since most of the survivors have now passed. Some of these accounts are documented in Donald E.Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide 1993 and Tessa Hofmann, “German Eyewitness Reports of the Genocide of the Armenians” in A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide 1985. These works, along with Sanasarian’s article, provide useful sources for this project. Further, government documents documenting eyewitness accounts of the genocide provide additional avenues to explore. Within the United States of America National Archives and Records Administration, located in Washington, D.C, I have discovered other several viable sources to examine. These specific sources listed are published online. These boxes of correspondence are titled, Record Group 59, Records of the Department of State, Internal Affairs of Turkey, and Internal Affairs of Armenia. Specific sources in these include the “Report on the treatment of Armenian children in Trebizond, July 20, 1915”, and “First-hand account by a Turkish army officer on the deportation of Armenians from Trebizond and Erzerum, December 26, 1916”. In these documents are statements such
|Carleton University |Department of Law and Legal Studies |
Course Outline
|Course: | |LAWS & HIST 3305 C & V – Crime and State in History |
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|Term:…
