Browse Primary Sources
Locate primary sources, including images, objects, media, and texts. Annotations by scholars contextualize sources.
Imperialism in North Africa: Song, Amina Annabi
North African women have long, rich traditions of vocal and instrumental music. At weddings and other joyous occasions, including religious celebrations, female musicians sing, perform, and dance.
Imperialism in North Africa: Personal Account, Captain Carette
To the east of Algiers is a rugged mountainous region, the Kabylia, whose loftiest peak is named after a holy woman, Lalla Khadija. The Berber-speaking inhabitants have always been known for their spirit of independence as well as for the veneration they accord to local Muslim saints, male and female.
Dona Marina, Cortes’ Translator: Poem, La Malinche
A well-known Chicana poem about Malinche. Tafolla took inspiration from the famous 1967 poem of the Chicano movement, “Yo Soy Joaquín,” but rewrites from an explicitly feminist perspective. The poem addresses the scene of European colonization, charting Malinche’s fate—as conquered woman, traitor, invincible survivor.
Dona Marina, Cortes’ Translator: Poem, Como Duele, 1993, Women in World History
One of the earliest meditations on Malinche and her meaning published by a Chicana in the United States. This narrative explores Malinche’s fate and her abilities to negotiate difficult and competing cultural demands. It also grapples with the violence of colonization—in history, in Mexico and in the United States.
Imperialism in North Africa: Interview, Djamila Bouhired
By the eve of the revolution, Algerian demands for even limited political and civil rights had been repeatedly rebuffed by the French colonial regime and the nearly one million European settlers in the country. The only possible solution was armed conflict, which broke out on All Saints Day, November 1954.
Dona Marina, Cortes’ Translator: Nonfiction, Octavio Paz
This essay, which seeks to explain modern Mexican sensibilities by examining the phrases “hijos de la chingada” and “malinchista,” presents La Malinche as violated woman—part victim, part traitor to her nation.
Imperialism in North Africa: Law, Code of Personal Status
In 1956 one of the most revolutionary family law codes in the Arab or Islamic world was proclaimed in the newly independent Tunisian state which, paradoxically, had not suffered a political revolution in the way that colonial Algeria would. What historical factors explain why Tunisian women won comparatively more legal and social rights than women in Algeria or Morocco?
Imperialism in North Africa: Interview, Tewhida Ben Sheikh
Tewhida Ben Sheikh [1909-2010] was the first North African Muslim woman to earn a medical degree from the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, in 1936, while Tunisia was still under colonial rule. After she was awarded her medical diploma in France, Madame Ben Sheikh returned to Tunis, where she opened a women’s reproductive health clinic, often providing free medical services for poor women.
Imperialism in North Africa: Autobiography, Fadhma Amrouche
Fadhma Amrouche was the illegitimate daughter of an impoverished, illiterate Berber peasant woman.
Imperialism in North Africa: Report, M. Coriat
North Africa has long been home to ancient, diverse communities of Jews, originally from Spain, Italy, Palestine, or elsewhere. Many claim to have inhabited the area stretching from Morocco to Tunisia for nearly two millennia—since around 70 CE—although others trace their roots even farther back in time to the Punic or Carthaginian period (ca. 814-146 BCE).
Royalists Desecrate the Revolutionary Cockade (3 October 1789)
Military officers in several regiments of the royal army favored a military strike to dispel the National Assembly, but by the fall of 1789 they saw clearly that this order would not be given. Their frustration with the National Assembly’s affront to the dignity of the royal family became evident to all on 3 October, in an event recorded by Bailly, then mayor of Paris, in his memoirs.
Victims on Display
Meaningless violence was precisely how the Duchess of Gontaut viewed the events of July 14th, especially the murder of the military governor of the Bastille and of the mayor of Paris, whose heads were placed on pikes and paraded around the city.
Imperialism in North Africa: Newspaper, Hubertine Auclert
From the middle of the 19th century on, European women settled in colonial empires in Asia and Africa in greater numbers. Some, even many, attempted to effect changes for the good of colonized women. One example of this in French Algeria was Hubertine Auclert, (1848-1914), the radical Parisian feminist writer and women’s suffrage activist.
A Defender of the Bastille Explains His Role
The soldiers stationed at the fortress did not see themselves as resisting the Revolution so much as keeping watch on a rather insignificant outpost that had nothing at all to do with the major events transpiring in Versailles.
A Conqueror of the Bastille Speaks
Having assembled at the traditional protest place in front of the City Hall, known as place des grèves (meaning sandbar, which it was, but which has come to mean "strike"), the crowd set off in search of ammunition. Eventually arriving at the Bastille, the crowd demanded that the few guardians of the fortress surrender.
Parisian Riots on 14 July
As demonstrations spread across Paris on the morning of 14 July, Pierre–Victor Besenval, commander of the royal soldiers stationed in the capital, contemplated ordering his men to suppress the protests. However, as reports poured in from across the city, he realized that the situation was moving beyond his control.
Desmoulins on His Own Role
Camille Desmoulins, an aspiring journalist and author of an anti–aristocratic pamphlet, had been closely following political events. Like many observers, he interpreted Necker’s dismissal as evidence that the King would soon use the troops stationed in Paris to dispel the Estates–General and suppress any demonstrations.
Street Demonstrations of Support for Necker (12 July 1789)
Gouverneur Morris, an American in Paris, wrote about the street protests that followed the King’s dismissal of the royal minister of finance, the popular Jacques Necker. Many Parisians considered Necker the man most able to enact reforms that might solve France’s fiscal and economic problems. His dismissal left many skeptical about the King’s interest in substantive reforms.
Imperialism in North Africa: Letters, Lalla Zaynab
In North Africa, Muslim and Jewish women’s quotidian religiosity was expressed in popular observances and festivals preserved chiefly, but not exclusively, in oral traditions. The most visible embodiment of these beliefs and practices were saints’ shrine where women (and men) honored especially pious individuals, who could be either male or female, living or dead.
Fears for the Bastille: A General’s Concern
In this excerpt from a letter of 5 July 1789, the Marshal de Broglie, head of the royal army who led a conservative faction at court, expresses his fears that amid the current unrest, the royal garrison and prison at the Bastille might come under attack. He advocates stationing reinforcements there to suppress an uprising.