Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprisings

Describing the mission of the socialist magazine Monthly Review, Marxist economist Paul Sweezy, its founding co-editor, liked to say that it wrote about “the present as history.” One of its earliest works was publishing I. F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950–1951 (New York, 1952), released while the conflict was still raging. This kind of history is a tougher task for scholars whose profession is closely tied to the study of declassified documents and the historical record. Historians usually let some time pass before treating an event. By deciding to write his doctoral dissertation about an event that was yet to occur when he had applied for his Ph.D., Alimagham bucked this trend. His account of the Green Uprising of 2009, a mass movement that followed the contested re-election of Iran’s President Mahmood Ahmadinejad, is primarily based on social-media postings by those who took part in...