Nationality United States Discipline historian | Alma mater Columbia University Died 5 November 2015 | |
Born 1927 New York City Sub discipline Ottoman maps and explorations | ||
Thomas Day Goodrich (1927–2015) was an American teacher and historian of the Ottoman Empire.
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Early life
Tom Goodrich was the son of a prominent scholar of Chinese history and language, which took him to live in China from the ages of 3 to 5. The family then moved back to the United States, where Goodrich attended school and did his military service.
In 1953, he received his master's degree from Columbia University. He wanted to teach overseas, so he accepted a position in Turkey at a middle school for boys, where he taught for four years. He then spent an additional year in Turkey teaching at a high school for girls in Izmir.
Scholarly career
Back in the US, Goodrich began a doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where he studied with Tibor Halasi-Kun (his thesis advisor) and Peter Gay.
With the help of a Fulbright Scholarship, Goodrich completed his dissertation, an in-depth study an translation of the Tarih-i Hindi-i Garbi. This is an illustrated history of the exploration and conquest of America written by an Ottoman author in the late 16th century. An expanded version of his dissertation was published as a book "The Ottoman Turks and the New World" in 1990.
Goodrich went on to bring to light several little-known Ottoman maps and to become an expert on Piri Reis. In the early 1990s he was invited by the Topkapi Saray Museum Library to prepare a catalogue their map collection, which he published in Imago Mundi.
Since 1967, Goodrich taught history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In 1973 he was elected chair of the University Senate. He retired in 1994 with emeritus status.
The Journal of Ottoman Studies dedicated two issues to Tom Goodrich in a "festschrift" in 2012.