Syrian

Sep 20, 2017

Phoenician or Arab, Lebanese or Syrian ~ Who were the early Immigrants to America?

This article is authored by Dr. Akram Khater, Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies and Khayrallah Distinguished Professor of Lebanese Diaspora Studies, and Professor of History at NC State. His earlier article focused on Lebanese-Americans in WWI. Between the 1870s and the 1930s some 120,000 immigrants left the Eastern Mediterranean and traveled to the… 

Sep 30, 2015

Latin America & the Arab World: One Hundred Years of Migration

This post is written by Lily Balloffet, the 2015-2016 Khayrallah Center Post-Doc Fellow. Read our interview with Lily from March where she discusses her dissertation topic of Arabic speaking immigrant communities in Argentina; her ideas of identity; and different ways that Arabic speakers assimilated into South American culture. Lily received her PhD from UC Davis and countless… 

May 27, 2015

Sneak Peek: Mapping Syrian-American businesses

In 1908 Salloum Mokarzel (the brother of Naoum Mokarzel, the publisher of Al-Huda, one of the earliest Arabic newspapers in the US)  and H.F. Otash published an Arabic/English directory of the businesses owned by “Syrians” (as all early immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean were called) in the US. The Syrian-American Business Directories cataloged the businesses of the… 

Mar 11, 2015

Meet the Khayrallah Center’s New Post-Doc Fellow: Lily Balloffet

This interview was conducted over email with Caroline Muglia, who works with the Khayrallah Center. Lily Balloffet is the winner of the 2015-2016 Middle East Diaspora Post Doctoral Fellowship, a prestigious award that is open to scholars in the humanities and social sciences whose scholarly work addresses any aspect of Middle East Diasporas. Lily’s fellowship… 

Jan 28, 2015

Lebanese in the Brazilian National Market

This article is written by John Tofik Karam who was a core faculty member in the Latin American and Latino Studies program at DePaul University in Chicago at the time of this writing. He now works as Director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research and teaching… 

Sep 17, 2013

Our Director in National Geographic!

Dr. Akram Khater, the Director of the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies is at it again. In case you’re wondering, we’re not certain he sleeps either! This time he provides some historical background for the Syrian-American community. As many of you readers know, the Syrian community has a rich history of immigration to the United… 

Jul 29, 2013

Helen Thomas, 1920-2013

He left his home in Tripoli, Syrian now Tripoli, Lebanon, in the 1890s as a teenager. He had only a few cents in his pocket and a talisman containing the traveler’s prayer around his neck. This month, longtime White House reporter, often called “The First Lady of the Press,” Helen Amelia Thomas died. Her impressive… 

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 unitiated,” they reported, the olives were “not so nice tasting.” Of course, North Carolina is home to so many restaurants that started out by serving “the unitiated” masses.…