Justin McCarthy (American historian)
| Justin A. McCarthy | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 25, 1945 Chicago |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans |
| Institutions | University of Louisville |
| Alma mater | University of California at Los Angeles |
| Notable awards | Order of Merit of Turkey (1998) |
Justin A. McCarthy (born October 19, 1945) is an American demographer, professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM). His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.
McCarthy denies the Armenian Genocide happened. Most genocide scholars label these massacres as genocide; he has faced harsh criticism by other scholars who have characterized McCarthy's views as genocide denial.
McCarthy served in the Peace Corps in Turkey, from 1967 to 1969, where he taught at Middle East Technical University and Ankara University. He earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Los Angeles in 1978. He later received an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University. McCarthy is also a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies.
McCarthy's studies concentrate on the period in which the Ottoman Empire crumbled and eventually fell apart. McCarthy believes that orthodox Western histories of the declining Ottoman Empire are biased, since they are based on the testimonies of biased observers: Christian missionaries, and officials of (Christian) nations who were at war with the Ottomans during World War I. Able to read Ottoman Turkish, he focuses on changes in the ethnic composition of local populations. Thus, he has written about the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus, as well as the Armenian massacres in Anatolia. Scholarly critics of McCarthy acknowledge that his research on Muslim civilian casualties and refugee numbers (19th and early 20th centuries) has brought forth a valuable perspective, previously neglected in the Christian West: that millions of Muslims and Jews also suffered and died during these years. Donald W. Bleacher, though acknowledging that McCarthy is pro-Turkish nonetheless has called Death and Exile "a necessary corrective" challenging the West's model of all victims being Christians and all perpetrators as being Muslims. While Daniel Pipes on Justin McCarthy's Ottoman casualty and refugee figures states:
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