Product Review

Winner of the Middle East Studies Association 2013 Undergraduate Education Award

Utilizing a mix of documents--including photographs, posters, diaries, diplomatic records, archival sources, and literary works--The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents is structured around an underlying theme of unity in diversity. This theme helps to offset students' stereotypical image of the Middle East and North Africa as an undifferentiated, monolithic, and unchanging part of the world inhabited mainly by terrorists and religious fanatics. Compiled and edited by two prominent historians, Julia Clancy-Smith and Charles Smith, the book's approach offers a compromise between conventional political and diplomatic histories and those focusing on social and cultural history. The authors demonstrate how the Middle East and North Africa have participated in and shaped the grand currents of global history during the past two centuries. Headnotes, extended captions, sidebars, introductory essays, and a robust photo program (including a documentary picture essay devoted to women and gender) provide an essential context framing the documents.