Abstract:

The Turkish-nationalist movements that developed underground until the Second Constitutional Period found the opportunity to expand after the 1908 Constitution and had a significant impact on history studies with the secularization of education. In this period when political Turkism was burgeoning, the methods of writing and researching history changed under the influence of Ottoman intellectuals familiar with Western culture, and Ottoman historiography met with European liberalism. As in the Western countries, the spread of new literary and scientific genres accelerated in this period and the interest in pre-Ottoman Turkish history steadily increased. Thus, during the Constitutional Monarchy period, historical studies that would remind the Central Asian past of the Turks gained importance with the advent of nationalism. As a result of the defeat in the First World War, Pan-Turkism left its place to a political understanding that brought Anatolian Turkishness to the fore. After the proclamation of the Republic, it was aimed to reveal the mechanisms of the first cultural language of humanity in Anatolia through language studies and to prove the great and fundamental success of the Turks in establishing the world's cultural languages with a theory. With the information and findings obtained, Turkey made an effort to position its own history like other national states and tried to define the identity of the state and citizen through the official Turkish history thesis. This study focuses on the scientific and ideological foundations of Turkish historiography. By comparing the Constitutional Monarchy and the Republican periods, it discusses the effect and results of nationalist historiography on the state-nation structuring through language and history studies. In addition, the effects of institutions and organizations created in the Republican period on modern Turkish historiography are examined and debated.