McCune Room, HSSB 6020
Unmentionables offers a history of the global textile industry and the Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it. As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they produced—silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing—moved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere.
Dr. Stacy D. Fahrenthold is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. She is a historian of the modern Middle East and specializes in labor migration, displacement, refugees, border studies, and diasporas within and from the region. Fahrenthold is the author of Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class (Stanford, 2024) and Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora (Oxford, 2019).