This is the first article in a three-part series on Persian studies in the United States.
Washington — When President Obama sent Nowruz greetings to Persian-speaking peoples around the world, he quoted a familiar line of the great Persian poet Saadi. Remarkably, the English translation that he used (“The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence”) is more than 150 years old, by the 19th-century American philosopher and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson.
