Targeted News Service
March 20, 2015 Friday 2:44 AM EST
Visiting Professor to Explain WWI Armenian Genocide
SLIPPERY ROCK, Pa.
Slippery Rock University issued the following news release:
Steven Usitalo, associate professor of history at Northern State
University, will present “The Armenian Genocide: Origins, Nature and
Consequences” at 6 p.m., March 26, in Slippery Rock University’s Smith
Student Center Ballroom.
The presentation is part of the SRU history department’s yearlong
examination of World War I at its 100th anniversary.
Usitalo, a Russian history expert, authored the 2013 “The Invention of
Mikhail Lomonosov: A Russian National Myth.” He co-edited “Russian and
Soviet History.” His doctorate degree in Russian history is from
McGill University.
The genocide, traditionally called the “great crime” by Armenians, was
the Ottoman government’s extermination of its minority Armenian
subjects living within the present-day Turkey. The total number of
people killed has been estimated at 1 and 1.5 million, according to
Wikipedia.
“During the First World War, the leadership of the Ottoman Empire
executed a series of decisions that resulted in the deaths of more
than a million Armenians-many deaths also occurred among other subject
peoples of the empire,” Usitalo said. “This was the first
state-organized genocide. It resulted directly from the rise in
organic nationalism, and population engineering that made the First
World War a watershed in ushering in a era of state sponsored,
popularly-driven and supported ethnic cleansing by regimes of targeted
populations.”
Historians consider April 24, 1915, as the start date of the Armenian Genocide.
Ottoman authorities arrested 240 Armenian intellectuals in
Constantinople. According to Wikipedia, the killing of people was
carried out during World War I in two phases. Men were massacred in
forced labor camps. Women, children and the elderly were marched to
their deaths in the Syrian Desert.
At the height of its powers, in the 17th-century, the Ottoman Empire
contained 32 provinces in southeast Europe, Southwest Asia (Anatolian
peninsula), the Caucasus, the Arab Middle East, and North Africa. The
empire collapsed during World War I and its aftermath and dissolved in
1922.
Usitalo also teaches on the history of science and film.
Usitalo’s presentation is the second focusing on the political
activities of the Ottoman Empire. An earlier speaker explained how
World War I ended the empire. Other guest professors have talked about
black soldiers in the war.
World War I, centered in Europe, resulted in 10 million military
personnel deaths and seven million civilians, according to Wikipedia.
Usitalo’s lecture is made possible by the Campus Outreach Lecture
Program of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and
Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, support by the
Jerome A. Yavitz Charitable Foundation, Inc. and Arlyn S. and Stephen
H. Cypen.
Contact: K.E. Schwab, 724/738-2199, karl.schwab@sru.edu