Purveyors of the past: Iranian historians and nationalist historiography, 1900-1941

"Purveyors of the Past" examines the intellectual, social and institutional context for Iranian nationalist historiography. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iranians began to appeal to the "science of history" in writing about the past. Through the medium of printed texts, scholars writing collaboratively at the court and several operating individually pioneered novel articulations of history. Subsequent generations brought history more firmly into the public sphere, initially as a repertoire of resistance to deal with new revolutionary contexts after the 1906 Iranian Constitutional Revolution, but later also as a means of crafting integrative nationalist narratives.;While previous studies have explored a limited number of historians of the early twentieth century, less has been said about their educational and social contexts. This dissertation examines how historians' social backgrounds, collaborative and patronage networks, and institutional settings contributed to diverse readings of the Iranian past. By moving beyond an assessment of the "great men" of Iranian nationalist historiography, it sheds light on previously ignored participants in the shaping of the Iranian past. Since many historians of the early twentieth century were school teachers, Iranian historiography can be characterized as having a pedagogical intent. This dissertation investigates the individuals operating within informal and formal networks of historiographical production who overwhelmingly produced integrative narratives of Iranian history---narratives that stressed the continuities of the Iranian past and indigenized diverse local and regional populations.