Captivating Strangers
Early Arab Immigrants in the United States
By Linda K. Jacobs
Captivating Strangers tells the story of the first Arab immigrants to the United States, from the North African acrobats who arrived before the Civil War, to the western-educated doctors who settled all over the United States in the twentieth century.
Each themed chapter–such as Syrians in Freemasonry, Carnival Impresarios, Middle Eastern Belly Dancers at the 1893 Chicago Fair, and the special relationship between the first Syrian Jewish immigrants and the first Syrian Christian immigrants to New York–shows the amazing variety of careers and accomplishments of these first Arab immigrants.
Linda Jacobs’s Strangers No More is an encyclopedic tour de force of the history of early Arab Americans across the United States. It is cogent, timely, insightful and full of new information never before published, and will remain a vital touchstone of that history for generations to come. With this new publication Jacobs proves once again that she is a leading scholar of Arab American history.
About the Author
Linda K. Jacobs is a New York-based scholar and author. She holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology/Anthropology and spent many years working on archaeological excavations and economic development projects in the Middle East. She is the author of Digging In: An American Archaeologist Uncovers the Real Iran (2012) and Strangers in the West: The Syrian Colony of New York City, 1880-1900 (2015) as well as a series of articles about the nineteenth-century Syrian colony in New York. Dr. Jacobs is committed to promoting Middle Eastern culture and knowledge in the United States, founding KalimahPress in 2011, establishing the Violet Jabara Charitable Trust, and sitting on the boards of the Near East Foundation, the Washington Street Historical Society, and the Moise Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. She has also served on the board of the American University of Beirut.
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