This paper examines the presentation of the history of Iran in the Iranian textbooks and how this representation correlates with students’ perceptions of the country’s past. Using methods of discourse analysis, the author reviews the images of the past that are offered explicitly or implicitly in the textbooks through inclusion and exclusion of certain eras and/or events, as well as through a variety of interpretations and normative descriptions,. Since an essential element of a comprehensive textbook analysis study is the response of the targeted audience of the books, qualitative interviews with students are going to be conducted to understand how they perceive Iran’s history and, more importantly, whether they consider the textbooks as legitimate sources of historical information. For long, textbooks have been considered as an important part of the modern educational systems and text analysis studies have been conducted extensively on their content and pedagogy. Furthermore, textbooks are considered to be an essential element in any design by a political system to protect social or national cohesion, to shape the narratives of the past, and to create a particular national identity in the younger generations. In addition, analysis of the textbook accounts of the history of a country following major political transformations has been of special interest for educational researchers and historians as it provides rich data for better understanding of how the new system is trying to create the new identity by formulating and representing new interpretations of the past. However, such studies are generally absent from the literature that studies Iran’s educational system. Three decades after the revolution of 1979, it remains long overdue to study Iran’s textbooks to see how they are influencing students’ perspectives towards their own past and their national identity. This paper is intended to be one of the first attempts to address this gap in the scholarship. For this study, the analysis is focused on middle school history textbooks as they cover the history of Iran before the 1979 revolution. The interviews are conducted with students who have finished middle school and therefore have already been exposed to the textbooks under study. The findings of the text analysis show that the images of the country before the revolution are mostly negative with a focus on the failures of the monarchies. Also the role of religious figures in different eras of history is presented as the most influential in the country's development.