Gold LEAF Institute Course Catalogue

In-Person

The history of the Ottoman Empire is not well known in the United States. Yet the Ottoman Empire's influence on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been significant and an understanding of the Ottomans assists with an understanding of current events.

The class will begin with the Osman family, the rise of the family in Anatolia, and the militant contention between the Muslim Ottomans and the Christian West.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the threats to Vienna in 1526 and 1683 defined Muslim/Christian relations until today. The empire's collapse in 1920 created a crisis in the Islamic world that reverberated throughout the Middle East.

4 Sessions

September 3, 10, 17, 24. 

4 pm-5:30 pm

Location: Ed Ctr, room 107

Chuck (his friend calls him Chuck) was born at a very young age and attended public schools in Greenland and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He surprised many people by graduating from the University of New Hampshire with a variety of classes that reflected a wide range of interests.

He, with his wife Diane, moved first to northeast Oklahoma and then to Joplin, Missouri, where Chuck found employment as a chemistry teacher. He had a highly successful career in Joplin teaching chemistry at Crowder Junior College and Missouri Southern State University. As a retirement project, Chuck attended Pittsburg State University in Kansas and earned a master's degree that focused on radical Islamic ideology with a thesis arguing Hamas's legitimacy.

Now Chuck enjoys reading and teaching about Middle Eastern history. As a Plant Science major at UNH, Chuck has retained a strong interest in botany and paints flowers on rocks that are seen frequently in Farmington. He, with Dan Meade, also builds the sets at Sparrow's Nest Theater in the theater district of the metropolis of Industry, Maine, population of 944.  Sometimes Chuck plays French horn at Henderson Memorial Baptist Church. He has performed as John Colter, a mountain man, and as Joseph Plumb Martin, a Connecticut soldier of the American Revolutionary War.