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Conducting Research in Lebanon: An Overview of Historical Sources in Beirut (Part I)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Sara Scalenghe
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
Nadya Sbaiti
Affiliation:
Georgetown University

Extract

Nearly two decades of war in Lebanon crippled possibilities for historical research during a period when scholarship underwent significant theoretical and methodological developments. The last several years, however, have seen a renewed vigor to preserve, catalog, and promote all types of sources that could possibly shed light on the rich history of the country and of the Middle East in general. Sources and resources in Lebanon are largely decentralized, rendering the country something of a logistical labyrinth that can cost scholars considerable expenditures of time and energy. This article is a modest attempt to facilitate research in Beirut. Although mostly geared towards historians, we hope that this article may prove useful to scholars from other fields as well. It is slightly slanted towards the British and American academies, particularly since the Francophone world has been so much more embedded in the intellectual and scholarly atmosphere of the country.

Type
Essays and MESA 2002
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2003

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References

1 Part II of this study will comprise a similar survey of archival sources outside of Beirut, and is scheduled to appear in the upcoming issue of the MESA Bulletin.

2 We would like to thank everyone who generously assisted us in the archives, institutes, and libraries of Beirut. We would also like to thank Asma Fathallah, Ellen Fleischmann, Jens Hanssen, Laleh Khalili, Jihane Sfeir Khayat, Said Kreidieh, Najwa al-Qattan, Roshanack Shaeri-Eisenlohr, and Stefan Weber.

3 The Tripoli court records have been the subject of several studies in the last fifteen years and are relatively accessible to the public. We will discuss these records in greater detail in the second part of this article.

4 See Najwa al-Qattan, “The Sijills of Beirut al-Mahrusa,” in this volume.