This tangled thread gets curiouser and curiouser.
It turns out that a recent popular history of the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, written by no less than the chair of the History Department at Yale University...
nytimes.com/2020/08/18/boo…
...which claims that the Ottomans "made our modern world" and influenced "nearly every major event" of the era "from China to Mexico" (claims reproduced faithfully in outlets such as the Washington Post)...
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0…
...but described by professional historians as full of "bizarre ideas," a "tissue of falsehoods, half-truths and absurd speculations," an "example of how global history should not be written"...
...based on "problematic" sourcing and replete with "overblown assertions"...
literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-…
...relied heavily (31 citations) on a work by an obscure author that, in the Turkish original, has no footnotes...
amazon.com/Sultan-Selim-I…
...and which was published by a little-known press in New Jersey that churns out flattering biographies of...Fethullah Gülen?🤔
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