The Modern Middle East and North Africa ─ A History in Documents

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.

Julia Clancy-Smith is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration (2011), which won two book awards, and Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia,1800-1904) (1994), which received three book awards. Clancy-Smith has also edited and co-edited a number of volumes and special journal issues.

Charles Smith is Professor Emeritus in the School of Middle East and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Eighth Edition (2012), and Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt (1983). A former member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he served as President of the American Research Center in Egypt, 1996-1999.