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Arab American Heritage Month 2023

Arab Immigration to the United States In the late 1800s, Arab immigration to the United States began, according to the Migration Policy Institute, with Arab Christians fleeing the Ottoman Empire—what’s now Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel—from religious persecution and conscription, as well as economic reasons. The U.S. Department of State reports that the immigrants mostly […]

2021 Events

COVID‑19’s Continued Toll As the year began, the nation was still firmly in the grip of COVID‑19, the novel coronavirus that first emerged in late December 2019 and spread around the world in 2020, prompting lockdowns, a global recession and upheaval on an unprecedented scale. In what became a record for the fastest vaccine development […]

Afghanistan War

War on Terror Begins Investigators determined the 9/11 attacks—in which terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, one at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and one in a Pennsylvania field—were orchestrated by terrorists working from Afghanistan, which was under the control of the Taliban, an […]

2020 Events

COVID‑19 Changed the World Forever On January 9, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that a cluster of mysterious pneumonia‑like cases in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 might have been caused by a previously unidentified coronavirus. By the end of that month, cases of the new virus were confirmed in Thailand, Japan and the United […]

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Here’s What ISIS Believes and How It Came to Be

Learn about the origins of ISIS and its leader Abu Musab al‑Zarqawi, who terrorized Iraq’s Shia Muslims with suicide bombers. Discover how successor Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi used social media to spread international terrorism before the group weakened.

Here’s What Caused the Great Recession

Discover the confluence of events that prompted the Great Recession in America and its main culprit: the subprime mortgage housing crisis. Learn how the Great Recession affected the economy and how it differed from the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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Here’s Why the Patriot Act Is So Controversial

Passed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Patriot Act has created new rules on surveillance and national security in the U.S. See why some believe it has kept the country safer, while others believe it violates Americans’ constitutional rights.

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The 9/11 Flag: Lost and Found

Shirley Dreifus, owner of the now‑iconic flag raised at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001, tells the incredible story of the flag’s role in the recovery, its disappearance, and the search to find it again.

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6 Groundbreaking Innovations by Arab Americans

While Americans born in or with ancestral ties to Arab countries have made countless significant scientific, medical and engineering contributions, most have never made it into record books. From cryptography, to the artificial heart, to the iPod, here are a few examples of some of the major advancements by Arab Americans. 1. Television Transmission and […]

How 38 IRA Members Pulled Off the UK’s Biggest Prison Escape

During the height of Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” in the 1970s and ‘80s, the British government incarcerated hundreds of Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) paramilitaries inside the notorious Maze Prison. Touted as Europe’s most secure penitentiary, the Maze was thought to be escape‑proof—that is, until 38 IRA prisoners staged the biggest jailbreak in British history in […]

How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland

For 30 years, Northern Ireland was scarred by a period of deadly sectarian violence known as “the Troubles.” This explosive era was fraught with car bombings, riots and revenge killings that ran from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. The Troubles were seeded by centuries of conflict between predominantly Catholic Ireland and predominantly Protestant […]

9/11: How Air Traffic Controllers Managed the Crisis in the Skies

The weather in the northeastern United States on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was what air traffic controllers describe as “severe clear.” A high‑pressure system had blown the previous day’s storms out to sea; skies were an intense cobalt blue. “A severe clear day means that you’re going to have a great day […]

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2003

21st Century

Topics

Arab American Heritage Month 2023

2021 Events

Afghanistan War

2020 Events

Videos

Here’s What ISIS Believes and How It Came to Be

Here’s What Caused the Great Recession

Here’s Why the Patriot Act Is So Controversial

The 9/11 Flag: Lost and Found

Stories

6 Groundbreaking Innovations by Arab Americans

How 38 IRA Members Pulled Off the UK’s Biggest Prison Escape

How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland

9/11: How Air Traffic Controllers Managed the Crisis in the Skies

This Day in History

Millions protest against the Iraq War in coordinated day of action

UN’s watershed Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is adopted

98 people die in Surfside condo collapse

Journalist Daniel Pearl is murdered

U.S. Capitol riot

Occupy Wall Street begins