The Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies is excited to announce the release of Migration and Health, a digital humanities project exploring migration’s impact on the human body. The project assesses the physical toll of migration on the tens of thousands of Arab immigrants who arrived in the United States between the late 1880s and the mid-1920s. 

The Khayrallah Center initiated the project over a decade ago. This first phase prioritized national statistical analysis of Arab American health by creating a dataset of more than six thousand standardized death certificates for first- and second-generation Arab Americans. In 2025, the Khayrallah Center revitalized the project to explore and encapsulate the history of Arab American health at four scales: national, statewide, community, and individual. As a result, Migration and Health not only asks how long people lived or how they died, but also examines what mortality records can reveal about the embodied experience of migration. The resulting evidence suggests that migration transformed health in varied, highly localized ways. Rather than producing a single pattern of illness, migration exposed Arab immigrants to distinct environments that generated divergent health outcomes.

Points of data listed in death certificates–occupations, addresses, causes of death, and places of birth–act as points of departure for generating a deeper understanding of the Arab American experience, enabling us to picture how these early Arab Americans lived, worked, and navigated the hardships of settlement. The project incorporates creative, diverse public history tools to paint a lively picture of Arab American health in the United States.

The project therefore combines statistical analysis with storytelling, spatial histories, and oral histories to create an expansive narrative of Arab health. The project highlights neighborhood circles and individual life histories to convey how these early Arab Americans constructed their own collective strategies to survive grueling labor, unsanitary living conditions, malnutrition, and racial hostility in the project’s two case studies: Massachusetts and Kentucky.

Migration and Health demonstrates that digital history can do more than identify demographic patterns. Used critically and at multiple scales, it can help reconstruct networks of kinship, care, adaptation, and survival that conventional readings of historical data often overlook, all while shedding light on new topics in the field of Arab American studies.

Navigating the Project

To explore Migration and Health, we recommend visiting our Introduction to the project. From there, the Massachusetts and Kentucky case studies offer more in-depth breakdowns of Arab American health and community.

For those interested in the project’s statistical analysis, interactive dashboards visualize the links between various causes of death, location, age, and sex.

For further explanation of the project, join our upcoming webinar on September 15, 2026, at 12:00 pm EST.