Library: U.S. History: Arab American History Resources

Books: Arab American Heritage and History

Arab New York by Emily Regan Wills
ISBN: 9781479897650
Publication Date: 2019-02-26
From Bay Ridge to Astoria, explore political action in Arab New York Arab Americans are a numerically small proportion of the US population yet have been the target of a disproportionate amount of political scrutiny. Most non-Arab Americans know little about what life is actually like within Arab communities and in organizations run by and for the Arab community. Big political questions are central to the Arab American experience--how are politics integrated into Arab Americans' everyday lives? In Arab New York, Emily Regan Wills looks outside the traditional ideas of political engagement to see the importance of politics in Arab American communities in New York. Regan Wills focuses on the spaces of public and communal life in the five boroughs of New York, which are home to the third largest concentration of people of Arab descent in the US. Many different ethnic and religious groups form the overarching Arab American identity, and their political engagement in the US is complex. Regan Wills examines the way that daily practice and speech form the foundation of political action and meaning. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with activist groups and community organizations, Regan Wills explores topics such as Arab American identity for children, relationships with Arab and non-Arab Americans, young women as leaders in the Muslim and Arab American community, support and activism for Palestine, and revolutionary change in Egypt and Yemen. Ultimately, she claims that in order to understand Arab American political engagement and see how political action develops in Arab American contexts, one must understand Arab Americans in their own terms of political and public engagement. They are, Regan Wills argues, profoundly engaged with everyday politics and political questions that don't match up to conventional politics. Arab New York draws from rich ethnographic data and presents a narrative, compelling picture of a community engaging with politics on its own terms. Written to expand the existing literature on Arab Americans to include more direct engagement with politics and discourse, Arab New York also serves as an appropriate introduction to Arab American communities, ethnic dynamics in New York City and elsewhere in urban America, and the concept of everyday politics.
Historical Dictionary of United States-Middle East Relations by Peter L. Hahn
ISBN: 9781442262942
Publication Date: 2016-09-19
U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East has remained crucial through many decades and the complications facing the United States in the Middle East have become even more acute. While the United States downgraded its military operations in Iraq, that country failed to achieve a stable, democratic footing and instead experienced schism and civil strife. Israeli-Palestinian disputes over land, the status of refugees, and control of Jerusalem intensified, and international conflicts between Arab states and Israel escalated for the first time since the 1980s. The Arab Spring protest movements of 2011 and after ignited political turmoil across the region, leading to revolutionary change in several states and triggering persistent unrest and violence in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. During the recent decade, in short, the Middle East has become the most unstable, dangerous, and complicated region of the world and the United States remains near the center of the maelstrom. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of United States-Middle East Relations contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on national leaders, non-governmental organizations, policy initiatives, and armed conflicts, as well as entries on such topics as intelligence, immigration, and weapons of mass destruction. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the US and Middle East Relations.
Contemporary Arab-American Literature by Carol Fadda-Conrey
ISBN: 9781479826926
Publication Date: 2014-05-30
The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the US as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, Carol Fadda-Conrey takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a US framework while maintaining connections to their homelands, Arab-Americans contest the blanket representations of themselves as dictated by the US nation-state. Deploying a multidisciplinary framework at the intersection of Middle-Eastern studies, US ethnic studies, and diaspora studies, Fadda-Conrey argues for a transnational discourse that overturns the often rigid affiliations embedded in ethnic labels. Tracing the shifts in transnational perspectives, from the founders of Arab-American literature, like Gibran Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, to modern writers such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Geha, Randa Jarrar, and Suheir Hammad, Fadda-Conrey finds that contemporary Arab-American writers depict strong yet complex attachments to the US landscape. She explores how the idea of home is negotiated between immigrant parents and subsequent generations, alongside analyses of texts that work toward fostering more nuanced understandings of Arab and Muslim identities in the wake of post-9/11 anti-Arab sentiments.
The Arab and the Brit by Bill Rezak
ISBN: 9780815609742
Publication Date: 2013-02-28
Born of a Palestinian father and a British mother, Rezak has always been intrigued by the different worlds from which his parents came. His father's ancestors were highwaymen on the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century. They sparred unsuccessfully with ruling Ottoman Turks and escaped with their families to America. His mother's parents were sent separately from Great Britain into indentured servitude in Canada, alone at the ages of ten and sixteen. They worked off their servitude, met, married, and moved to New York State. In The Arab and the Brit, a memoir that spans multiple generations and countries, Rezak traces the remarkable lives of his ancestors. Narrating their experiences against the backdrop of two world wars and an emerging modern Middle East, the author gives readers a textured and vivid immigrant story. Rezak recalls his paternal grandmother apprehending would-be Russian saboteurs during World War I, his grandfather's time at Dr. Bernardo's home, a shelter for destitute children, and his father's work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association following World War II. Told with humour and captivating detail, The Arab and the Brit chronicles the trials and triumphs of one family's struggle to succeed in the New World.
Life in the Terror Decade by Nabeel Abraham (Editor); Sally Howell (Editor); Andrew Shryock (Editor)
ISBN: 9780814335000
Publication Date: 2011-09-30
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Detroit's large and nationally prominent Arab and Muslim communities have faced heightened prejudice, government surveillance, and political scapegoating, yet they have also enjoyed unexpected gains in economic, political, and cultural influence. Museums, festivals, and cultural events flourish alongside the construction of new mosques and churches, and more Arabs are being elected and appointed to public office. Detroit's Arab population is growing even as the city's non-Arab sectors, and the state of Michigan as a whole, have steadily lost population. In Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade, a follow-up to their volume Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (Wayne State University Press, 2000), editors Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell, and Andrew Shryock present accounts of how life in post-9/11 Detroit has changed over the last ten years. Abraham, Howell, and Shryock have assembled a diverse group of contributors whose essays range from the scholarly to the artistic and include voices that are Palestinian, Iraqi, Yemeni, and Lebanese; Muslim and Christian; American born and immigrant. The book is divided into six sections and begins with wide-angle views of Arab Detroit, looking first at how the community fits within greater Detroit as a whole, then presenting closer portraits of Arab Detroit's key ethnonational and religious subgroups. More personal, everyday accounts of life in the Terror Decade follow as focus shifts to practical matters such as family life, neighborhood interactions, going to school, traveling domestically, and visiting home countries. Finally, contributors consider the interface between Arab Detroit and the larger society, how this relationship is maintained, how the War on Terror has distorted it, and what lessons might be drawn about citizenship, inclusion, and exclusion by situating Arab Detroit in broader and deeper historical contexts. In Detroit, new realities of political marginalization and empowerment are evolving side by side. As they explore the complex demands of life in the Terror Decade, the contributors to this volume create vivid portraits of a community that has fought back successfully against attempts to deny its national identity and diminish its civil rights. Readers interested in Arab studies, Detroit culture and history, transnational politics, and the changing dynamics of race and ethnicity in America will enjoy the personal reflection and analytical insight of Arab Detroit 9/11.
Islamophobia/Islamophilia by Andrew Shryock (Editor)
ISBN: 9780253354792
Publication Date: 2010-06-30
"Islamophobia" is a term that has been widely applied to anti-Muslim ideas and actions, especially since 9/11. The contributors to this provocative volume explore and critique the usefulness of the concept for understanding contexts ranging from the Middle Ages to the modern day. Moving beyond familiar explanations such as good Muslim/bad Muslim stereotypes or the "clash of civilizations," they describe Islamophobia's counterpart, Islamophilia, which deploys similar oppositions in the interest of fostering public acceptance of Islam. Contributors address topics such as conflicts over Islam outside and within Muslim communities in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia; the cultural politics of literature, humor, and urban renewal; and religious conversion to Islam.
Backlash 9/11 by Anny P. Bakalian; Medhi Bozorgmehr
ISBN: 9780520257344
Publication Date: 2009-03-05
For most Americans, September 11, 2001, symbolized the moment when their security was altered. For Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans, 9/11 also ushered in a backlash in the form of hate crimes, discrimination, and a string of devastating government initiatives. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of the post-9/11 events on Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans as well as their organized response. Through fieldwork and interviews with community leaders, Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr show how ethnic organizations mobilized to demonstrate their commitment to the United States while defending their rights and distancing themselves from the terrorists.
Etching Our Own Image by Anan Ameri; Holly Arida; Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, Mich.) Staff (Contribution by)
ISBN: 9781847181954
Publication Date: 2007-06-01
Etching Our Own Image: Voices From Within the Arab American Art Movement is a celebration of Arab American art and identity. In the wake of 9/11, the need for Arab Americans to define themselves, rather than be defined by others has galvanized an artistic movement. This collection of writers includes poets, musicians, playwrights, creative writers, painters, conceptual artists, comedians and scholars of the arts who have gathered to assert for themselves what it means to be Arab American and an artist. Arab American artists use their art both to resist and to embrace their past, present and future. Through their art they retain their origins, while creating something new. They collaborate and come together. The artists included here are above all artists and the artistic renderings in this collection demonstrate their commitment to craft, innovation, and expression. They take on the task of etching their own image willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously. By telling their own stories through their own artistic mediums, these voices from within the Arab American art movement reclaim their own image and tell the world who they are.
Arab Detroit by Nabeel Abraham (Editor); Andrew Shryock (Editor)
ISBN: 9780814328125
Publication Date: 2000-07-31
Metropolitan Detroit is home to one of the largest, most diverse Arab communities outside the Middle East, yet the complex world Arabic-speaking immigrants have created there is barely visible on the landscape of ethnic America. In this volume, Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock bring together the work of twenty-five contributors to create a richly detailed portrait of Arab Detroit. The book goes behind the bulletproof glass in Iraqi Chaldean liquor stores. It explores the role of women in a Sunni mosque and the place of nationalist politics in a Coptic church. It follows the careers of wedding singers, Arabic calligraphers,restaurant owners, and pastry chefs. It examines the agendas of Shia Muslim activists and Washington-based lobbyists and looks at the intimate politics of marriage, family honor, and adolescent rebellion. Memoirs and poems by Lebanese, Chaldean, Yemeni, and Palestinian writers anchor the book in personal experience, while over fifty photographs provide a backdrop of vivid, often unexpected, images. In their efforts to represent an ethnic/immigrant community that is flourishing on the margins of pluralist discourse, the contributors to this book break new ground in the study of identity politics, transnationalism, and diaspora cultures.
Arab American Women by Michael W. Suleiman (Editor); Charlotte Karem Albrecht (Contribution by); Sarah M. A. Gualtieri (Contribution by); Lisa Suhair Majaj (Contribution by); Mejduline Shomali (Contribution by); Carol Haddad (Contribution by); Bridget Blomfield (Contribution by); Nadine Naber (Contribution by); Umayyah Cable (Contribution by); Evelyn Asultany (Contribution by); Amira Jarmakani (Contribution by); Suad Joseph (Editor); Rita Stephan (Contribution by); Therese Saliba (Contribution by); Louise Cainkar (Editor); Jess Bier (Contribution by); Amy Rowe (Contribution by); Gregory Orfalea (Contribution by)
ISBN: 9780815637097
Publication Date: 2021-12-30
Arab American women have played an essential role in shaping their homes, their communities, and their country for centuries. Their contributions, often marginalized academically and culturally, are receiving long- overdue attention with the emerging interdisciplinary field of Arab American women's studies. The collected essays in this volume capture the history and significance of Arab American women, addressing issues of migration, transformation, and reformation as these women invented occupations, politics, philosophies, scholarship, literature, arts, and, ultimately, themselves. Arab American women brought culture and absorbed culture; they brought relationships and created relationships; they brought skills and talents and developed skills and talents. They resisted inequities, refused compliance, and challenged representation. They engaged in politics, civil society, the arts, education, the market, and business. And they told their own stories. These histories, these genealogies, these narrations that are so much a part of the American experiment are chronicled in this volume, providing an indispensable resource for scholars and activists.
Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry by Allen, Frank
ISBN: 03630277
Publication Date: 2000
Arab American poetry is an especially rich, people-involved, passionate literature. Twenty poets are presented in this collection, fifteen of them living, five of them women. They start with Ameen Rihani and Kahlil Gibran and include celebrated contemporaries who write in Arabic or English or both.
Love is an ex-country [Audiobook] by Randa Jarrar
ISBN: 9780593413753
Publication Date: Apr 18, 2023
Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat woman. Randa Jarrar is all of these things. In this "exuberant, defiant and introspective" memoir of a cross-country road trip, she explores how to claim joy in an unraveling and hostile America.
I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir by Malaka Gharib
ISBN: 9780525575115
Publication Date: April 30th, 2019
I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid.

Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, and Eid al-Adha

Ramadan in Kansas City

Understanding Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, and Eid al-Adha

Local Organizations for the Middle Eastern Community

Middle Eastern Restaurants and Local Businesses

Notable Arab Americans in Academia

Elias James Corey
Winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Fawwaz T. Ulaby
First Arab-American winner of the IEEE Edison Medal
Samih Farsoun
Professor of sociology at American University and editor of Arab Studies Quarterly
Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.
President of Purdue University
Donna Shalala
Former president of the University of Miami

Featured Biographies from Park DEI&B

Malala Yousafzai

Malala grew up in Mingora, Pakistan. Her father wanted her to have every opportunity a boy would have, so he ran and taught an all-girls school in their village. When she was 10, the Taliban took control, enforcing bans on everything from owning a television to girls going to school. In 2012, Malala spoke out publicly on behalf of girls and their right to learn, making her a target for the extremist group. On her way home from school, a gunman boarded her school bus and shot her. She awoke 10 days later in Birmingham, England. She knew she had a choice: either live a quiet life or dedicate her time and energy to fight for girls' education around the globe. Fortunately for everyone, she chose the latter. In 2020, she graduated from Oxford University, and continues to fight to ensure that every girl receives 12 years of free, safe, and quality education with her organization the Malala fund.

Doug Flutie

Former San Diego Chargers quarterback Doug Flutie, who is of Lebanese descent, threw the "miracle touchdown" pass for Boston College and won the Heisman Trophy in 1984. In 1986 he signed with the NFL's Chicago Bears, and in 1994, he threw a record 48 touchdown passes while playing for the Canadian Football League Stampeders. Flutie returned to the NFL in 1998 with the Buffalo Bills, where he won the Pro Bowl and NFL Comeback Player of the Year. He also played for the San Diego Chargers from 2001 to 2004, and finished his career as a member of the New England Patriots in 2005.

Tony Fadell

Apple CEO Steve Jobs hired Arab American inventor Anthony "Tony" Fadell and put him in charge of a new special projects group within the company. The result was the iPod, which launched in 2001. Fadell, who is now known as "the father of the iPod," went on to oversee the first 18 iterations of the device before Jobs gave him his next assignment: to create a mobile phone with many of the same features as the iPod. This time, the end product was the iPhone, which changed the way people access information.

Salma Hayek

Salma Hayek, who is of Lebanese and Mexican descent, is an actress who has starred in many movies and TV shows. Since 1989, Hayek has appeared in numerous award-winning films, including Frida, Wild Wild West, and Fools Rush In. She's also an advocate for victims of domestic abuse, immigrant rights, and refugees.

Hoda Kotb

Born in Oklahoma in 1964 to Egyptian parents, Hoda Kotb began her broadcasting career as a news assistant in 1986. She became a correspondent for Dateline NBC in 1998, and went on to cover some of the most important events of the time, including the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Linda Sarsour

Linda Sarsour has earned accolades as one of the most prominent progressive activists in the country. She also served as the former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, and co-chair of the Women's March. She advocates for rights of all people: immigrants, Muslims, women, Black victims of police violence, Standing Rock Native Americans, and many more.

Ernest Hamwi

Credited for inventing the ice cream cone, Hamwi sold Zalabia, crisp, wafer-like pastries cooked on a waffle iron, at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. When the ice cream booth next to Hamwi's stand ran out of dishes, he rolled one of his pastries into a cone. Within a few minutes, it hardened and the world's first ice cream cone was served.

Michael DeBakey

DeBakey was an American surgeon who developed the first artificial heart. A legendary physician and educator, DeBakey's 75-year career transformed cardiovascular surgery, raised medical education standards, and influenced national healthcare policy. Alongside inventing the artificial heart, DeBakey pioneered dozens of operative procedures such as aneurysm repair, coronary bypass, and endarterectomy, and performed some of the first heart transplants.

Videos: Arab American History and Heritage

Journal Articles: Arab American Heritage Month

Databases

Biography (Gale In Context) This link opens in a new window
Search for biographies based on name, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, birth/death dates and places, gender, or other keywords.
U.S. History (Gale in Context) This link opens in a new window
Includes scholarly content on hundreds of the most significant people, events and topics in U.S. history.
U.S. History (Gale OneFile) This link opens in a new window
Contains scholarly journals and magazines with balanced coverage of events in U.S. history and scholarly work being established in the field.
Diversity Studies (Gale OneFile) This link opens in a new window
Explores cultural differences, contributions and influences in the global community. Includes articles from 150 journals, updated daily.