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Iranian Studies: Primary Sources Online

Library and Research Guide

Primary Sources Online

Library of Congress Persian Language Rare Materials consists of manuscripts, lithographic books, and early imprints, as well as printed books, housed in the African and Middle Eastern Division (AMED) and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran Digital Archive explores women's lives during the Qajar era (1796-1925) through various 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 in the Qajar world. 

The Iranian Oral History Project at Harvard is a unique resource for studying modern Iranian history. 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.

Miras Maktoob Persian E-Books consists of 249 volumes (189 works) originally published by the Written Heritage Research Institute (Miras-i Maktub) in Tehran. These e-books, exclusively available from Brill, include works in both Persian and Arabic on Islamic history and culture in the broadest sense.

McGill Library's Islamic Lithographs Digital Collection includes over 750 lithographed volumes printed in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in the Middle East (Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Turkey), North Africa (Morocco), and South Asia (India, Pakistan).

Woman, Life, Freedom Movement of Iran (web archive) preserves material on, about, and from the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement of Iran, which emerged in the wake of the 2022 police killing of Mahsa Jîna Amini.