Iran: From Mythology to Movement
From CIA coups to women-led resistance — understanding Iran across generations.
Nothing comes out of the ether. The narrative of Iran as a "rogue state" or "axis of evil" was built deliberately — and it begins with a coup most Americans have never heard of.
This reading journey starts in 1953, when the CIA overthrew Iran's democratically elected government to protect oil interests. It moves through the graphic novel that became a generation's introduction to the Islamic Revolution, into classic Persian satire as cultural survival, and ends with contemporary women-led resistance.
From CIA intervention to the Women, Life, Freedom movement — follow the full arc from seeing the mythology to raising the future.
SEE THROUGH IT
All the Shah's Men
Stephen Kinzer
The CIA overthrew Iran's democracy. For oil.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
FEEL THE FISSURE
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi
Rebellion drawn in black ink.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Raise the Future
Department of Childish Revolution
For the adults raising the future:
Resistance starts at storytime.
Iranian kids grow up navigating two worlds — the one their parents left behind and the one framed by headlines. These books give them language for both. From saffron-scented memories to graphic novels about revolution, this is how you teach nuance before the news cycle flattens it.
Age-appropriate. Ideology-unapologetic.
→ Explore the DoCR CollectionCompanion Viewing
Same argument, different medium.
Persepolis(2007)
dir. Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud
The bundle's whole arc is in the film's title —Persepolis, the ancient Persian capital, before it becomes the story of a revolution lived through one girl's eyes. Myth to movement, in ninety-six minutes.
Animated adaptation of Satrapi's own graphic memoir — a girl coming of age in Tehran during and after the 1979 revolution, then in exile, then back home as an adult reckoning with who she's become.
Why it’s here: Satrapi adapted her own story, so nothing here is secondhand. Punk in the plainest sense: the Iranian government denounced it, and she made it anyway. Pedagogical in that it teaches a kid what authoritarianism actually feels like to live through — not the textbook timeline, the daily compromises.