HIST 370 - Modern Middle East: Primary Source Collections

Here are entered works treating collectively the Arabic-speaking countries of Asia and Africa, or of Asia only.

The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. Developed by an engineering team from CLIR and Stanford Libraries, the platform federates and makes accessible data about collections from around the world.

This collection includes a wide range of audio tapes and English publications about the Palestinian struggle for self determination, the colonization of Palestine and Zionism. Political journals and monographs from multiple viewpoints on topics such as Zionism, Israeli abuses of human rights and international law, the role of the US and Britain policy in shaping Palestine, as well as on the Middle East and the Arab world. Perspectives in this collection are drawn from international organizations in the West and the Middle East, Palestinian revolutionary organizations, academics, thinkers and students, and voices of everyday Palestinian resistance. The majority of the materials in this collection are paper documents; monographs, periodicals, articles and pamphlets; however it also includes a number of important and unique audio materials. The bulk of the collection focuses on Palestinian resistance between 1948 and the early 1990s.

The collection consists of the 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. Of these, 118 narratives have been digitized and are available to researchers through this database.

The collection provides scholars and practitioners the opportunity to listen to and read the personal accounts of many of Iran's former political leaders as they recall the times and events that shaped their lives and the life of their country.

This collection of documents is intended to provide readers with first-hand knowledge of basic documents on Israel's foreign relations since the pre-state period (1947). ​​​​​​​​​

Israel at War Primary Sources

Here are entered works on the region consisting of Asia west of Pakistan, northeastern Africa, and occasionally Greece and Pakistan.

Documents relating to Middle East since 1944

Difficult to access for years, now exclusively available here. View digital versions of Iranian newspapers and periodicals capturing key historical events as they happened.

These newspapers and periodicals, many of which have been only partially accessible inside Iran, cover the defining moments from the following three eras:

The premiership of Mohammad Mossadegh and the August 1953 coup d'état against his government (1950-53)
The 1979 Revolution; and
The late 1990s/early 2000s ‘reform era’ of former President Mohammad Khatami.
Containing more than 12,000 pages, the collection is freely accessible without restriction.

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.

Great collection of historical/governmental/legal documents relating to Middle East.

TIMEA provides online access to texts, maps, and images documenting travel to the Middle East (primarily Egypt) between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These materials range from travel guides, travel narratives, and museum catalogs to stereocards, advertisements and postcards. To facilitate access and analysis, the texts are fully searchable, and the images are richly described. TIMEA also makes available interactive, dynamic GIS (Geographical Information Systems) maps that reveal the relationships between geographical features such as elevation and water and cultural phenomena such as settlement patterns. Finally, TIMEA provides teaching and research guides that explore the process of conducting research and set the materials in context.