Mediterranean History

Iran/Persia in Primary Sources

This is a guide to historical research--focused on primary source material--available to Boston College for Mediterranean History.

Digital Public Library of America
Aggregates digital collections from around the U.S. and offers excellent tools to discover and explore them. Contributing institutions provide access to photographs, government documents, newspaper clippings, books, and other forms of ephemera. Focuses on 17th to 21st centuries.

Gallica
Interface in English and French (and other major, European languages). Majority of the content in French.
France's fantastic digital library from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Digitized periodicals, images, recordings, and more. Covers two millenia with particular strength from 1500 to the present.
Open Access.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Interface in English. Content in English or other languages.
Digitized collections from the Library of Congress, includes manuscripts, books, photos, maps, audio recordings, and more. Strongest between the 17th and 21st centuries. Content dating back to B.C.E.
Open Access.
World Digital Library: Iran, Islamic Republic of
More than 350 curated (in English) facsimiles of documents across 2 millenia of Persian/Iranian history, including maps, religious texts, and other documents.

Digital Persian Archive
The Project aims at facilitating access to the growing number of available Persian historical deeds and documents, both published and unpublished. It shall allow work on archival material with the help of incorporated facsimiles without recourse to the original - often remote - place of publication or storage.

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From Philipps Universitat in Marburg
Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran
Explore the lives of women during the Qajar era (1796-1925) through a wide array of materials from private family holdings and participating institutions. Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran provides bilingual access to thousands of personal papers, manuscripts, photographs, publications, everyday objects, works of art and audio materials, making it a unique online resource for social and cultural histories of the Qajar world.
Malek National Library and Museum
The Malek National Library in Tehran, Iran provides digital facsimiles of manuscripts as well as ephemera such as textiles, ceramics, glass and metal objects, lacquer arts and paintings, stamps and miniatures, and more. Texts mostly in Farsi.

Iran Social Science Data Portal
Online portal that features social science data on Iran, including socioeconomic data, electoral data, information on political parties, and translations of selected laws and regulations. It aims to provide a service to journalists, academics, policymakers, and others interested in analyzing political and socioeconomic developments in contemporary Iran.
World Bank: Islamic Republic of Iran
Data on Iran from the 1960s onward.
International Monetary Fund: Iran

HeinOnline World Constitutions Illustrated: Iran
Includes the text of the 1906 Constitution and 1907 Constitutional Laws as well as the 1979 Constitution. Also includes commentary and scholarship on those texts and laws.

Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC)
Includes federal legislative, administrative and judicial materials from the collections of government and academic law libraries. With new materials added regularly, this on-going digitalization project will eventually include full-text of materials in many areas including canon law, military law, Native American law, the Yale Blackstone collection, the law of Commonwealth countries, and civil law of western European countries.

Malek National Library: Maps
More than 130 maps provided by the Malek National Library in Tehran. Interface partly in English, text in Farsi.
Irancarto
Edited by Bernard Hourcade and published in Paris by Mondes Iranien et Indien. The site contains over 600 maps and trilingual analyses (French, Persian, English) regarding a variety of topics such as demography, ethnology, history, language, economics, politics, and election data.

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)
1941-1996. Transcribed and translated foreign broadcasts and news. The original mission was to monitor, record, transcribe, and translate intercepted radio broadcasts from foreign governments, official news services, and clandestine broadcasts from occupied territories. Now offers the opportunity for students to expand their research into primary sources that originated in languages they do not have.
Nexis Uni
Thousands of U.S. and international news sources; legal materials: case law, statutes and law reviews; and company/business information.
Primarily 1990-present
World News Connection
Full text news (1995-2013) compiled from thousands of non-U.S. media sources translated into English, the information in WNC covers significant socioeconomic, political, scientific, technical, and environmental issues and events. Coverage is by region and includes: East Asia, Near East and South Asia, China, East Europe, West Europe, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Harvard Iranian Oral History Project
Personal accounts of 134 individuals who played major roles in or were eyewitnesses to important political events in Iran from the 1920s to the 1980s

Human Rights Watch: Iran
Includes reports and news about Iran and Human Rights since 1988.

CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup
Includes more than 30 documents relating to the CIA's involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq.

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Institution: National Security Archive
Digital National Security Archive
Collections include Iran-Contra Affair (4,884)‎; Iran Revolution (4,239)‎; U.S. Policy and Iran, 1978-2015 (2,056)‎.
Iran-U.S. Relations (National Security Archive)
The Iran-U.S. Relations Project promotes the multinational, multi-archival exploration of “hot button” issues in the two countries’ complex relationship spanning more than 70 years.