Itzkowitz added that one of the objectives, in addition to simply teaching history, is to get students thinking about reputations, how they are earned and how they stick through the ages.

“Were they evil or not? Do the subjects deserve the reputation they have?” Mr. Itzkowitz said, moral forays in which the young readers are asked to think seriously about the subject of each book and to make their own judgments. Intended for students between 5th and 10th grades, the thoroughly researched accounts include maps, drawings, timelines, glossaries, and bibliographies, but, more important, they are, Mr. Goldberg in the 1990s, the subject was the ethnic conflict in the Balkans, but their most recent collaboration resulted in a four-part series, A Wicked History (Scholastic 2007) featuring an all-star lineup of evildoers: Genghis Khan, The 13th-century Mongolian Tyrant Grigori Rasputin, Holy Man or Mad Monk? Vlad the Impaler: The Real Count Dracula and Tomás De Torquemada, Architect of Torture During the Spanish Inquisition. Itzkowitz, now 76, has a certain boyish, slightly mischievous affect that may reflect the subject of latest endeavor: children’s books about bad guys.

Sitting his tiny, picturesquely untidy office in Firestone, with its faint, familiar scent of old books, Mr. The Immortal Atatürk: A Psychobiography, which came out in 1994, was written with Vamik Volkan, now an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Carl Brown, now a Foreign Affairs emeritus at Princeton University. What followed was his seminal work, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (1962), and, later, The Psychological Dimensions of Near Eastern Studies, the 1977 volume he co-edited with L. After receiving his doctorate in History and Oriental Studies the following year, he pursued an interest in psychoanalysis, studying at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. Itzkowitz’s 50-year devotion to Near Eastern Studies began when he joined the University’s faculty at age 26 in 1958 and published an article, “Eighteenth Century Ottoman Realities,” rebuking the then-Eurocentric attitude in academia toward understanding Near Eastern languages. “I’ve made my reputation doing that for the Ottoman Empire.” “It’s not enough to know what people say, you’ve got to know what they do,” according to Norman Itzkowitz, a professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at the University and a subscriber to the psychohistorical practices of Sir Lewis Namier, who used wills and tax records to reflect 18th-century parliamentary voting patterns in Great Britain. Book by Princeton Professor Emeritus Introduces Young Readers to ‘Wicked History’ Matthew Hersh

Genghis Khan by Norman Itzkowitz