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Wine and Olive Diet

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Dec 12, 2012

Project awarded a $10,000 grant from the NC Humanities Council

Khayrallah Program’s Lebanese in North Carolina Project Wins $10,000: Award granted by North Carolina Humanities Council The Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies at North Carolina State University was awarded $10,000 by the North Carolina Humanities Council for the 2012 cycle. This award is to help fund The Lebanese in North Carolina Project, a 3-year-old effort to research,…

Dec 10, 2012

Mapping Early Lebanese, Part I

This installment provides background on the year-long collaborative project with The Digital Innovation Lab. The next installment will include the interactive tools designed for the community. Telling the story of the largely unstudied Lebanese community in North Carolina would not be possible without the generous donations of family photographs and home movies as well as…

Sep 12, 2012

Listening to the music of Lebanon

After the documentary premiered at the North Carolina Museum of History in March and April, many of you asked about the musical selection we chose for the film. With great thanks to University of California, Santa Barbara as well as our very own Naji Hilal, the music is now available. The music, like the narrative…

Sep 1, 2012

Home movies of Joseph El-Khouri

Joseph Maroun El-Khouri was an immigrant to the United States in 1949. He was born in Kour, Batroun, Lebanon in 1924 to Rev. Maroun El-Khouri and Mariam Yazbek El-Khouri, one of seven children. Joseph was asked to come to the United States to help settle the estate of an uncle in Minneapolis, MN.  He had…

Aug 29, 2012

A filmmaker’s perspective on North Carolina

The Lebanese in North Carolina Project is dedicated to collecting, curating, and disseminating materials of the Lebanese-American experience in the state. Like most materials, the generous donations from families capture life in North Carolina from the Lebanese perspective. But what about the context within which many Lebanese-Americans lived? When we hear stories of peddlers and…

Aug 26, 2012

Reuniting the Alkazins

Many families were divided due to immigration. David Alkazin left the United States in 1900 with his daughter, Rosa, and son, Elias. It was a full six years before their mother and his wife, Mariam, followed with the younger children. Mariam and her children, Alice, Michel, Afife, and Antsun, traveled across the Atlantic on the…

Aug 13, 2012

Peddler’s license

An 1897 article in a Wilmington newspaper titled “The Peddlers License: A Word or Two About How To Many Peddlers Fake It” details the perception of Assyrian peddlers. Today, many families have ties to first-wave immigrants arriving in North Carolina from the 1880s to 1940s.  Many of these immigrants made money as peddlers. This article…
A family of four (father, mother, son and daughter) with their faces squished together.

Aug 8, 2012

Lebanese-Americans abroad

Many Lebanese-Americans—first or second wave immigrants, second or third generation—consider North Carolina their home, but don’t lose sight of the important work to be done internationally. Wael Abou-Chakra spends much of his time volunteering in Romania and other countries. And the late Shafick George Hatem (affectionally referred to as “Uncle Shag”) dedicated his life to…

Aug 3, 2012

Patrick and his grandmother

Dorothy Findelin’s eldest son, Patrick who now lives in Virginia with his family, recalls a few great memories of his 95-year-old grandmother, Alma Parker, who currently lives in the Triangle. Born in 1917 in Edgecomb County and married to Shikralla Doumit Farris in 1941, she remains a strong member of the community.   When we…

Jul 23, 2012

Wine and Olive Diet

In 1896, the Fayetteville Observer noted (about halfway through the article) that “a number of Syrians… received a case of wine and olives from Damascus.”  “To the uninitiated,” they reported, the olives were “not so nice tasting.” Of course, North Carolina is home to so many restaurants that started out serving “the uninitiated” masses. What…