LibGuides: Modern Assyrian History & Culture: Assyrian Archival & Special Collections

Sayad Rare Book Collection

Sayad Rare Books Collection
In 1970, Reverend Eshoo Paul Sayad donated nearly 1000 books on Assyrian and Middle Eastern history to the University Library. Of these 295 were deemed rare and are part of the library's Rare Book Collection. The Sayad Collection is housed in Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) on the third floor of the University Library on the Turlock main campus.

Reverend Eshoo Paul Sayad

Special Collections and Archives material
Consult Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA) Research Guide and Librarian Mary Weppler for additional information about the Sayad collection.

Assyrian Archival Resources in Research Libraries

Irene Kliszus Papers, 1996-1999, @ Columbia University
Collection contains Kliszus's research files and notes on her family history and on the Assyrian Christians during the Armenian genocide.
Justin Perkins Papers, ca. 1830-1869, @ Amherst College
Educator, minister and missionary to Persia. Collection includes correspondence with others in his field, manuscript sermons, lectures and notes, some newspaper clippings and pamphlets, and some bound manuscripts, mostly letters and journals.
Records of the Assyrian Church of the East, 1940, @ Yale University
Annual publication of the Assyrian Church of the East for the year 1940.
Chaldean Federation of America papers, 1993-2000, @ University of Michigan
Programs, newsletters, and other publications accumulated by the organization; also videotapes and artifactual miscellanea.
W.P.A. California Folk Music Project collection, 1936-1991, collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell, @ Library of Congress
The WPA California Folk Music Project is a multi-format ethnographic field collection that includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California. The collection comprises 35 hours of folk music recorded in twelve languages representing numerous ethnic groups and 185 musicians.
Kurdistan, Assyrian songs, 1948-1952, [sound recording] / collected by Henry Yonan, @ UCLA
These recordings document the dialect and language spoken by the Assyrian tribes at the time of World War I (about 1915) in what is now Eastern Turkey. After the war the Assyrian community never returned to the area. Some of the songs are about WWI and the Russian advance into Turkey... The songs are of 3 different types: old Assyrian, unique Assyrian, and translation of hymns.
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The songs were produced by Elizabeth Mando (1903-1989) and Youell Mando (1898-1958) in the U.S., but come from the City of Mazri in the province of Tkhuma in the eastern Kurdistan Mountains (city and province are no longer there) … The collection was created and deposited in the Ethnomusicology Archive by Henry Yonan of Burton, Michigan … The songs were recorded in Flint, Michigan -- the artists, who came from the mountain regions of Eastern Turkey, were displaced during WWI… Some songs repeat themselves because they were recorded at different times and on different record.

Assyrian Oral History Project @ Stanislaus State Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA)

The Assyrian Oral History Project offered by Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA) at Stanislaus State is now available online via JSTOR's Contributed Collections. It contains recordings and transcripts of interviews from members of the local community collected through the Turlock Assyrian Oral History Project.

Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA) Local History Resources
Consult SCUA Research Guide and Librarian Mary Weppler for additional information about this project.

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