The Tehran Bread Riots (December 8-9, 1942) were an important moment in the history of Iranian democracy and its tradition of urban social protest. One of the consequences of the political and economic liberalization that accompanied the Anglo-Soviet invasion and occupation of Iran (1941-1946) were urban bread shortages. On the December 9, 1942, students from across Tehran organized a march on the parliament building in Baharistan square to demand the government address the food shortage and social conditions. After delivering a series of speeches, the students were joined by another crowd, described in the sources only as gangsters, militants, and anarchists, who stormed the parliament building, looted shops, and burned down the prime minister’s home. Ervand Abrahamian, Stephen McFarland, and Fakhreddin Azimi have examined the Bread Riots from the perspective intrigues between Iranian elites and the manipulations of foreign embassies. In all these accounts, the mob were pawns of Mohammad Shah Pahlavi and were part of a plot to undermine Prime Minister Qavam. However, the actions of the crowd point not towards elite machinations, but toward an autonomous subaltern consciousness that deeply resented both domestic and foreign elites. My research uses a new lens and new documents to examine the interests and desires of the Tehran underclass. The U.S. embassy in Tehran followed events closely and was critical of British accounts of events. I also examine editorials in Etella’at as well as smaller Iranian newspapers for important details about the composition and actions of the crowd. I also use a subaltern method to read documents against the grain to re-construct the aims of the crowd. By tracing the targets of mass violence, we can begin to describe the objectives and aims of collective action.

While studies of consumption in European and American fields now form a considerable, interconnected body of literature, similar research for Iran remains patchy. When it comes to Muhammad Reza Shah’s reign (1941-1979), consumerism is usually subsumed within a larger project about why the Iranian Revolution occurred, creating – as prominent Iranian social critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad did – a monolithic story of cultural and economic imperialism and crass imitation. In such narrations, consumerism often becomes synonymous with Westoxification, and while that discourse and experience is important, it is not the only way we should read the growth of a consumer culture post-World War II. This paper takes a decolonial approach to re-think the contours and development of consumerism in Iran, focusing on the role of the American Point IV Program. This and other development programs accelerated the expansion of a certain form of capitalist consumption, while also altering – sometimes coercively – existing habits and attitudes of consumption. My research builds on Pamela Karimi’s recent pioneering work (2013) on domesticity and consumer culture in Iran. In addition to using the under-utilized Point IV archives for Iran and original oral history interviews, I theoretically expand Karimi’s examination of American influence on the Iranian domestic scene by introducing Lauren Berlant’s concept of intimate publics. An intimate public is one in which there is “an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience.” I argue that the Point IV Program served as one important way to generate an intimate, transnational consumer public in Iran, such as by introducing similar commercial goods like refrigerated ice and ideas and methods of homemaking. To combat underdevelopment, Point IV workers and affiliates tried to inculcate certain modes of consuming in Iranians and sought to reorganize their actions and domestic spaces around the new appliances and goods that a “developed” – that is, capitalist – economy would both bring and require to sustain itself. Dining rooms needed to be redone to fit chairs and tables, vacuums purchased to generate hygienic homes for the family, and clothes altered conform to the proper housewife and working husband image. This was not a purely externally imposed process. Internal factors as well, such as urbanization, previous historical connections, local adaptation and resistance, and state efforts, along with the impact of WWII, all aided and shaped it.

In the history of modern Iran, the 1960s saw an acceleration of domestic and international efforts at providing education to Iranians of all ages, in all corners of the country. When Mohammad Reza Shah launched his ‘White Revolution’ in 1963, chief among these social reforms was a renewed focus on improving educational opportunities for all Iranians. Through partnerships with various domestic and international organizations, the Iranian government invested in the construction and repair of elementary and secondary schools, established the Literacy Corps (Sepah-e Danesh) to provide schooling in the provinces, produced millions of new textbooks at the elementary through university levels, and supported the creation of educational media such as books, magazines, and television and radio programs. Though both the Shah and his wife, the Empress Farah Pahlavi, took great pride in their projects related to improving education and literacy, the practical aspects of such an endeavor proved a significant logistical challenge for a population still living mostly outside the urban centers. This paper thus seeks to understand both the shape that education took in the rural areas as well as the practical aspects of achieving mass education in a time when much of the population was rurally situated. My project builds on David Menashri’s foundational work concerning the history of education in Iran by expanding the discussion to focus on projects carried out in Iranian villages and rural areas. Drawing on oral histories as well as the archives of UNESCO, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. State Department, and the Franklin Book Program’s offices in Tehran and Tabriz, I argue that education in rural Iran was achieved through the cooperation between a number of domestic and international entities. I outline the different strategies employed by the various organizations involved in spreading literacy throughout Iran in the two decades before the revolution, as well as their creative solutions to media distribution which allowed for efficient and direct delivery of educative materials and personnel to needy areas.

In an AHR Roundtable, Peter Perdue noted, “‘Crisis’ is a moving target . . . Environmental historians should at least try to look behind the immediate issues to longer-term structural and cultural changes” (2008, p. 1454). The water crisis, or bohran-e ab, is one of the most pressing concerns for Iranians today. It and other environmental issues occupy a prominent place in popular discourse and the agreement (in principle) on the necessity of addressing environmental problems spans Iranian political factions. Although some voices place the blame for Iran’s environmental problems directly on the policies of the Islamic Republic, environmental change, its connection with both state policies and societal practices, and the recognition of these issues predates 1979, as Sadeghian (2016) demonstrated in relation to Iranian forestry. Unfortunately, Sadeghian’s article is one of the few studies centering pre-revolution environmental policy in Iran and so our understanding of contemporary Iranian environmentalism’s historical context is considerably lacking. I argue a deeper historical treatment of Pahlavi Iran shows that many Iranian policy makers recognized the environmental issues facing their country before the revolution (although environmental concerns did not have the popular currency they do today) and the particular concerns of Iran’s early environmentalists demonstrate some phenomena like dust storms, drying lakes, and air pollution have roots in the pre-revolution period. My source materials include the memoirs of Eskandar Firouz (Pahlavi Iran’s pre-eminent environmentalist), records of Iranian participation in international organizations (e.g. International Union for Conservation of Nature), academic publications (e.g. the journal Mohit-e Zist), and legislative texts. Surveying these documents will allow us to see exactly what environmental problems Iran’s early environmentalists believed were most urgent, what causes they perceived, and what solutions they proposed in response. Additionally, I hope to identify the logic(s) under-girding their environmental conceptualizations in order to add texture to Abe’s (2013) brief linking of pre-revolution environmentalism with the broader modernist sentiments of Iran’s technocratic class. A more complete understanding of the environmental concerns of the Pahlavi period allows us to better identify the continuities and discontinuities in policies, actions, and logics before and after 1979. This historicization of the environmental problems facing Iranians today will provide more context for current solutions put forward by Iranian scientists and politicians. This project is only one aspect of the under-studied environmental history of modern Iran and I hope for it to serve as a reminder of the need for more research.