author
Albert Howe Lybyer
1876–1949
A pioneering American historian of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, he brought firsthand experience from Istanbul into a long academic career in the United States. His work helped lay the groundwork for Ottoman studies in America.
2 Audiobooks
The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental Trade from The English Historical Review, October 1915
by Albert Howe Lybyer
The government of the Ottoman Empire in the time of Suleiman the Magnificent
by Albert Howe Lybyer
About the author
Born in Putnamville, Indiana, in 1876, Albert Howe Lybyer studied at Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1900, and later earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1909. Early in his career he taught at Robert College in Istanbul, an experience that shaped his lifelong interest in the history of the Middle East and southeastern Europe.
Lybyer went on to teach at Harvard, Oberlin College, and, most notably, the University of Illinois, where he served from 1913 until 1944 and later became professor emeritus. University of Illinois archival material describes him as a founding scholar of Ottoman studies in the United States, and his 1913 study of the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificent is remembered as an influential early work in the field.
His expertise also reached beyond the classroom. During and after World War I, he served as a technical adviser to the Inquiry, the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and the King-Crane Commission. In later years he wrote and edited on modern Balkan and Near Eastern history, building a reputation as both a careful scholar and an engaged observer of international affairs.