Celebrating Arab American Heritage
April is Arab American Heritage Month! Explore the resources on this page to learn and read more about Arab American history, important figures, literature, and more!
New Books
Important Arab American Biographies
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Call Me American: A Memoir
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Call Number: CT275.I43 A3 2019ISBN: 9780525433026Publication Date: 2019Abdi Nor Iftin first fell in love with America from afar. As a child, he learned English by listening to American pop artists like Michael Jackson and watching films starring action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger. When U.S. marines landed in Mogadishu to take on the warlords, Abdi cheered the arrival of these real Americans, who seemed as heroic as those of the movies. Sporting American clothes and dance moves, he became known around Mogadishu as Abdi American, but when the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab rose to power in 2006, it suddenly became dangerous to celebrate Western culture. Desperate to make a living, Abdi used his language skills to post secret dispatches to NPR and the Internet, which found an audience of worldwide listeners. But as life in Somalia grew more dangerous, Abdi was left with no choice but to flee to Kenya as a refugee. In an amazing stroke of luck, Abdi won entrance to the U.S. in the annual visa lottery, though his route to America was filled with twists and turns and a harrowing sequence of events that nearly stranded him in Nairobi. Now a proud resident of Maine and on the path to citizenship, Abdi Nor Iftin's dramatic, deeply stirring memoir is truly a story for our time: a vivid reminder of why western democracies still beckon to those looking to make a better life.
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Biography Reference Source (EBSCO)
Biography Reference Center contains thousands of full-text biographies of notable people.
Special Topics
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Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community
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Publication Date: 2003As Arab Americans seek to claim their communal identity and rightful place in American society at a time of heightened tension between the United States and the Middle East, an understanding look back at more than one hundred years of the Arab-American community is especially timely. -
Arab Americans in Michigan
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Publication Date: 2008The state of Michigan hosts one of the largest and most diverse Arab American populations in the United States. As the third largest ethnic population in the state, Arab Americans are an economically important and politically influential group. It also reflects the diversity of national origins, religions, education levels, socioeconomic levels, and degrees of acculturation. Despite their considerable presence, Arab Americans have always been a misunderstood ethnic population in Michigan, even before September 11, 2001 imposed a cloud of suspicion, fear, and uncertainty over their ethnic enclaves and the larger community. In Arab Americans in Michigan Rosina J. Hassoun outlines the origins, culture, religions, and values of a people whose influence has often exceeded their visibility in the state. -
Becoming American: the Early Arab Immigrant Experience
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Call Number: E184 .S98 N26 1993ISBN: 0585108099Publication Date: 1993A unique study in American immigration and assimilation history that also provides a special view of one of the smaller ethnic groups in American society.Naff focuses on the pre-World War I pioneering generation of Arabic-speaking immigrants, the generation that set the patterns for settlement and assimilation. -
Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal
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Call Number: E184.A65 A67 2021 (EBOOK)ISBN: 0815655134Publication Date: 2021Arab 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.
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Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader's Guide
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Publication Date: 2011Within the spectrum of American literary traditions, Arab American literature is relatively new. Writing produced by Americans of Arab origin is mainly a product of the twentieth century and only started to flourish in the past thirty years. While this young but thriving literature varies widely in content and style, it emerges from a common community and within a specific historical, political, and cultural context. In Modern Arab American Fiction, Salaita maps out the landscape of this genre as he details rather than defines the last century of Arab American fiction. -
Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemproary Arab American Poetry
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Publication Date: 2008At no other time in American history has our imagination been so engrossed with the Arab experience. An indispensable and historic volume, Inclined to Speak gathers together poems, from the most important contemporary Arab American poets, that shape and alter our understanding of this experience. These poems also challenge us to reconsider what it means to be American. Impressive in its scope, this book provides readers with an astonishing array of poetic sensibilities, touching on every aspect of the human condition. -
Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics
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Publication Date: 2007Using a mix of literary and social analysis, this book examines a broad range of modern Arab American literary fiction and illustrates how numerous socio-political phenomena have affected the development of the Arab American novel. -
Culture, Class, and Work among Arab-American Women
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Call Number: E184 .A65 R43 2004 EBISBN: 1593321201Publication Date: 2004Read examines the labor force activity of Arab-American women, a group whose work experiences provide an exception to accepted theories. The employment rates of Arab immigrant women rank among the lowest of any immigrant group, while the rates of native-born Arab-American women resemble those of U.S.-born white women. These differences cannot be explained by Arab-American women's human capital characteristics or family resources, but are due to traditional cultural norms that prioritize women's family obligations over their economic activity and to ethnic and religious social networks that encourage the maintenance of traditional gender roles. Read's findings challenge assumptions about variations in ethnic women's labor force participation. Arab cultural values play an important role in determining the position of women of Arab descent in American society.
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Arab-American Relations in the Persian Gulf byCall Number: JK1428.A68 N33ISBN: 0844731544Publication Date: 1975A thorough analysis of United States policy toward and long-range relations with a vital oil-producing region.
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American-Arab Relations from Wilson to Nixon byCall Number: DS63.2.U5 A6ISBN: 0819106801Publication Date: 2018-03-20
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Homeland Insecurity: the Arab American and Muslim Experience after 9/11 by
Call Number: E184.A65 C35 2009ISBN: 9780871540485Publication Date: 2009 -
Atlas of the conflict: Israel-Palestine
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Call Number: G2236.S1 S5 2010ISBN: 9064506884Publication Date: 2010
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A Kid's Guide to Arab American History by
Call Number: E184.A65 D46 2013ISBN: 9781524715700Publication Date: 2013 -
Sitti's Secrets
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Call Number: PZ7.N976 SI 1997ISBN: 9780027684605Publication Date: 1997Mona’s grandmother, her Sitti, lives in a small Palestinian village on the other side of the earth. Once, Mona went to visit her.
The couldn’t speak each other’s language, so they made up their own. They learned about each other’s worlds, and they discovered each other’s secrets. Then it was time for Mona to go back home, back to the other side of the earth. But even though there were millions of miles and millions of people between them, they remained true neighbors forever. -
Baddawi
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Call Number: DS80.55.P34 A234 2015ISBN: 1935982400Publication Date: 2015Coming-of-age story about a young boy named Ahmad struggling to find his place in the world. Raised in a refugee camp called Baddawi in northern Lebanon, Ahmad is just one of the thousands of Palestinians who fled their homeland after the war in 1948 established the state of Israel. In this visually arresting graphic novel, Leila Abdelrazaq explores her father's childhood in the 1960s and '70s from a boy's eye view as he witnesses the world crumbling around him and attempts to carry on, forging his own path in the midst of terrible uncertainty. -
My First Language
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Call Number: PE1117.S6358 M94 2016ISBN: 9781508119616Publication Date: 2016In this fictional narrative, readers will learn about a girl and her family from Morocco that move to Chicago. Key vocabulary and colorful illustrations will allow readers to follow along as Leila transitions to a new country, makes new friends, and learns a second language. This fiction title is paired with the nonfiction title Amr Speaks Arabic. -
Amr Speaks Arabic
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Call Number: PE1117.S6358 A47 2016ISBN: 9781508118121Publication Date: 2016Readers will embrace this engaging story of Amr. He is a teacher who has moved from Egypt to the United States to teach Arabic to English-speaking students. Students in Amr’s class listen closely with a sense of wonder as they learn about Egypt, while learning how to speak Arabic.
