For advanced undergraduates as well as graduate students, a case-study based survey of the tortuous emergence of modern nations and nation-states, as well as of more "delayed" and "unfulfilled", therefore frustrated nationalisms, out of a matrix of ethno-confessional diversity, in the context of a decaying and disintegrating empire. The Great Powers, the new nationalisms, and the Porte. Modernization and nation-building. Converting millets into nations. Ambitions and their limits. Rival irredentisms. Claims of language, of history, of symbolic geography. Predictable tragedies : war and revolution; atrocities; forced migrations. The state experience and the human experience. The struggle for sanity and stability in contested space. Constructions of national memory and of forgetfulness. For the possibility of being taken as graduate course, subject to additional readings and work requirements, see HIST 597.