This idea that both Iran and the United States could reach beyond the countries that frustrated them and find a “natural ally” had a long pedigree, one that has not always been fully appreciated by historians. Decade after decade, dating back at least to the 1850s, successive Iranian governments had looked to the United States as a potential "third force” that could counteract the pressures from Britain and Russia. Decade after decade, Americans had looked to Iran as a mystical, benevolent, faraway Persian kingdom that seemed more appealing than the radical, hostile Arab world. This belief in an "alternative" force, lying just over the horizon, proved powerful and durable in both the American psyche and the Iranian—and arguably really fully disappeared only after 1979.
The very first newspapers published in North America, it turns out, were absolutely enchanted by Iran. In the 1720s, at a time when "the United States" had yet to come into existence, and Britain's North American colonies were largely a land of yeoman farmers, tobacco plantations, and quiet settler villagers, newspapers in Boston and Philadelphia reported regularly on events in the Persian Empire with a breathless, even hysterical energy. Week in and week out, publications like the Boston News-Letter, the Boston Gazette, and Philadelphia's American Weekly Mercury fell over one another to feed (and stoke) the public appetite for information about Persia. At one point, the Mercury was regularly devoting 25 to 30 percent of its column-inches to Persian affairs. In July 1724 the newspaper even led with a regretful note: "We have at present no News concerning" the situation, "neither do we hear anything from Persia." In the American colonies in the 1720s, the mere absence of news from Iran was a front-page story.
Though this might seem odd or surprising, the reason was fairly straightforward. In the summer of 1722, in the lawless Pashtun tribal regions of Kandahar, a revolt had broken out against the authority of the shah. The Afghan rebel Mahmud Hotaki, angered by Persian attempts to force his people to convert from Sunni to Shia Islam, had led an attack on Persian garrisons, then swept across the eastern provinces of the empire and laid siege to the capital, Isfahan, for six months.
The brutal siege had starved eighty thousand people to death and brought chaos to the Persian Empire. So it was merely the big news story of the day when Americans first started publishing newspapers. What was perhaps most extraordinary about the American press coverage though (at least from a twenty-first-century perspective) was how overtly one-sided it all was — or, rather, which side it took. The American media in the 1720s were uniformly, passionately, and unapologetically pro-Iranian.