While the debates of the first term of Iranian Parliament- the National Consultative Assembly, or Majles (1906-1908) - have long been an important source for historians and other scholars, no serious effort has ever been undertaken to try and properly understand this historical source. As a result, a number of misconceptions exist about the debates of the early parliament and what survives as their minutes. The present paper aims to dispel some of these misconceptions by focusing on two issues: 1) whether - and to what extent - what survived to our day (by the virtue of being published in the Majles newspaper) should be considered the official minutes of the parliament; 2) what were some of the characteristics of the later edition of the minutes published as the supplement to the Official Gazette of Iran. This is achieved by the careful analysis of a number of sources, mainly the debates themselves, legal documents, periodicals and memoirs.

The paper presents the phenomenon of principal stress rotation in cohesive subsoil resulting from its loading or unloading and the impact of this phenomenon on the values of soil shear strength parameters: undrained shear strength τfu, effective cohesion c’, effective angle of internal friction φ’. For this purpose, tests in a triaxial apparatus and torsional shear hollow cylinder apparatus on selected undisturbed cohesive soils: sasiCl, saclSi, clSi, Cl, characterized by different index properties were carried out. Soil shear strength parameters were determined at angle of principal stress rotation α equal to 0° and 90° in tests in triaxial apparatus and α equal to 0°, 15°, 30°, 45°, 60°, 75°, 90° in tests in torsional shear hollow cylinder apparatus. The results of laboratory tests allow to assess the influence of the principal stress rotation on the shear strength parameters that should be used to determine the bearing capacity of the subsoil.