Clark University historian Professor Taner Akcam will be delivering a talk titled “Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide” at Watertown’s Armenian Museum of America on April 3, the Armenian Weekly reported.
Akcam—the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stpehen and Marian Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University—has made landmark discoveries that prove the Ottoman government’s central role in planning the Armenian Genocide.
Despite decades of scholarly research, the scarcity of direct evidence has allowed Turkey to persist in its denial. Professor Akcam will discuss the findings published in his groundbreaking new book, Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (2018). He will highlight a recently discovered document, a “smoking gun,” which removes the cornerstone of Turkey’s denialism. He will show that the killing orders signed by Ottoman Interior Minister Talat Pasha, which the Turkish Government has long discredited, are authentic.
Akcam is the author of more than ten scholarly works as well as numerous articles in Turkish, German, and English on Armenian Genocide and Turkish Nationalism. His most known books are A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006, received the 2007 Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction) and Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012, awarded in 2013 Hourani Book Prize of The Middle East Studies Association; and selected as one of Foreign Affairs’ Best Books on the Middle East for 2012).
