Answer to history (1980)
Answer to history is a 1980 kings and rulers book written by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
Written in exile after the 1979 revolution that ended his reign, the last Shah of Iran sets down his account of the monarchy and the forces that brought his rule down. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi defends his modernization programs, his military and land reforms, and revisits the 1953 confrontation with Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The tone is that of a deposed ruler arguing his case: aggrieved, self-justifying, alert to the foreign hands he blames for his fall. Completed shortly before his death in 1980, it remains a partisan primary source on Iran's last dynasty and the man at its center.
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What is Answer to history about?
Written in exile after the 1979 revolution that ended his reign, the last Shah of Iran sets down his account of the monarchy and the forces that brought his rule down. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi defends his modernization programs, his military and land reforms, and revisits the 1953 confrontation with Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The tone is that of a deposed ruler arguing his case: aggrieved, self-justifying, alert to the foreign hands he blames for his fall. Completed shortly before his death in 1980, it remains a partisan primary source on Iran's last dynasty and the man at its center.
When was Answer to history published?
Answer to history was published in 1980.
Who made Answer to history?
Answer to history was written by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
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A few thoughts on Answer to history
Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir Persepolis tells the other side of the same rupture, the revolution seen by a girl growing up in Tehran. The film Argo dramatizes the hostage crisis that followed the Shah's flight. Both turn the abstractions of a deposed ruler's defense into lived streets, fear, and ordinary people caught in the turn of history.
Downfall stories told by the people who caused them
Answer to History is Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's defense of a reign that ended in exile, certain he was the wronged party. Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street let their disgraced narrators tell it their way, unapologetic to the end, and Catch Me If You Can follows a con man recounting his own run, while Oppenheimer sits a compromised man across the table from history's judgment.
Firsthand accounts of a regime coming apart
Written from exile after the 1979 revolution that swept him from power, Answer to History argues its author's side of a fall the rest of Iran remembers differently. Persepolis and Argo cover that same upheaval from the ground and from outside it, Fear No Evil is a dissident's own account of surviving a regime that eventually collapsed, and American Experience turns that kind of history into documentary.
Kings and empires losing their grip on power
Answer to History is a deposed monarch's last word on his lost throne, and these dramas stage that same slide from power in more distant courts. Vikings and The Last Kingdom follow rulers fighting to hold their crowns, Spartacus: House of Ashur and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood put power in the hands of men willing to kill for it, and Rise of the Conqueror tracks a ruler's climb toward that fall.