Book by Salim Tamari reconstructing late-Ottoman Palestine and Jerusalem through the wartime diary of Ihsan Turjman, a soldier conscripted into the Ottoman army in 1915. Tamari uses Turjman's diary to recover the social, cultural, and gendered textures of Jerusalem before the onset of British rule, showing how nationalist frameworks subsequently erased the plurality of Ottoman-era life. The book places Jerusalem within broader regional currents of empire, war, and everyday experience that standard nationalist historiographies have obscured. Recommended for scholars and students working on Ottoman Jerusalem, Palestinian historiography, and the intersection of imperial history and social life, as Tamari's close reading of a single primary source models a method for recovering suppressed histories from within the documentary record.
