Celebrating Diversity Archives - Page 2 of 3

Celebrating Diversity: Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. The QC Library celebrates AAPI Heritage Month with featured resources in honor of Asian American history, culture, and contributions to social diversity.

The AAPI Heritage Month guide features open and licensed resources, including current facts, print books, and electronic resources (eBooks, streaming media, digital archives, etc.). Below are a few of the featured resources. More information of interest may be found in the Asian Studies guide.

AAPI Population by State

“Per a 1997 U.S. Office of Management and Budget directive, the Asian or Pacific Islander racial category was separated into two categories: one being Asian and the other Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander.” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022). In 2020, the estimated number of Asian alone or in combination in the United States was 24 million (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022).

Asian Population Visualization — The visualized total population of Asian Alone (left) and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Alone (right) by State. Data Source: U.S. Census Bureau; 2016-2020 American Community Survey, 5-Year Estimates. The *visualization* was prepared with *Social Explorer.*

Featured Books

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
New York, New York: One World, 2020

“Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative–and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality will change the way you think about our world.”

Amina’s Song by Hena Khan
New York: Salaam Reads, 2021

Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature. “In the companion novel to the beloved and award-winning Amina’s Voice, Amina once again uses her voice to bridge the places, people, and communities she loves across continents.”

Permutations of a Self by Thomas V. Nguyen
College Station: Texas Review Press, 2020

“Much of the poetry comes from Nguyen’s imperfect memory of himself and others as it changes over time.” “The poetry in this manuscript is about accepting that and reconciling what it means to be part of his family.”

Asians and Pacific Islanders in American Football Book Cover

Asians and Pacific Islanders in American Football by Joel S. Franks
Lanham, Maryland: Lexington, 2018.

“This book sheds light on experiences relatively underrepresented in academic and non-academic sports history. It examines how Asian and Pacific Islander peoples used American football to maintain a sense of community while encountering racial exclusion, labor exploitation, and colonialism.”

Digital Archives

PBS.org: “Celebrate the month with a collection of PBS video stories that explore the history, traditions, and culture of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States.”
DiversityInc.com: “A new study reports that 8 in 10 Asian Americans believe they are regularly discriminated against in the United States.”
Stop AAPI Hate.org: Launched in March 2020, the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center “tracks and responds to hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.”

Streaming Media

Hmong musicians in America: “This 58-minute video tells the story of two senior musicians from Laos who play instruments and sing for various American audiences, adapting their presentations for Hmong and non-Hmong listeners of all ages.”
Language of a Nation: How Hawaii Became Part of the U.S., Parts 1-4: “Native Hawaiian filmmaker Conrad Lihilihi presents a four-part historical Docu-series examining the 1896 Hawaiian Language Ban from public education. This series approaches the subject by culminating in a rich and diverse panel of academics in language, history, and politics.”
Chinese American History: Origins of an Organic Farmer: “Hiu Newcomb, a third-generation Chinese American, is the co-owner and operator of Potomac Vegetable Farms in Vienna, Virginia. In this interview, she discusses her family’s origins in the United States and her start as an organic farmer in Virginia.”
FORKLIFE: Children of Sticky Rice: “FORKLIFE traces the journeys of immigrant food traditions taking root in the United States, narrated by the D.C. chefs and cooks who carried them here.”

Celebrating Diversity: Irish-American Heritage Month Resources

Resources for Irish-American Heritage Month, by Nancy Foasberg, Librarian for Irish Studies

The QC Library celebrates Irish-American Heritage Month by gathering and presenting resources related to the Irish-American experience, and to the achievements of Irish Americans.

The Irish-American Heritage Month guide features both types of resources. To present a picture of Irish-American history, it includes books about Irish immigration to the United States, Irish-Americans in the American Civil War, and the Irish-American experience. The guide also honors the literary and artistic achievements of Irish-Americans, including in poetry, short stories, and film.

Here are a few highlights from the guide:

Documentary Film: Adelante (2014). Adelante showcases an Irish Catholic church on the outskirts of Philadelphia that is attracting the patronage of Mexican immigrants in the area. The film shares the expectant joy of the newly arrived families as they establish lives in an unfamiliar, often bewildering country that offers opportunities entangled with sometimes painful compromises. At its core, Adelante is a celebration of two groups’ growth and an embrace of their evolving community.

Book: The Columbia Guide to Irish-American History (2005). Timothy J. Meagher fuses an overview of Irish American history with an analysis of historians’ debates, an annotated bibliography, a chronology of critical events, and a glossary discussing crucial individuals, organizations, and dates. He addresses a range of key issues in Irish American history from the first Irish settlements in the seventeenth century through the famine years in the nineteenth century to the volatility of 1960s America and beyond. The result is a definitive guide to understanding the complexities and paradoxes that have defined the Irish American experience.

Book: The Irish American Experience in New Jersey and Metropolitan New York: Cultural Identity, Hybridity, and Commemoration (2014). his book is a collection of nine essays exploring the Irish-American experience in the New Jersey and New York metropolitan area, both historically and today. The essays place the local Irish-American experience in the wider context of immigration studies, assimilation, and historical theory.

Poetry Collection: The Sphere of Birds (2008). The Sphere of Birds, Ciaran Berry’s debut collection of poems, effortlessly moves back and forth between here and there, then and now, the personal and the historic, the modern and the mythic. Berry imagines the transatlantic journeys of John James Audubon and reveals his own heartfelt experience moving from his first house. Accessible, immediate, and visceral, The Sphere of Birds offers a musicality that is increasingly rare in contemporary poetry.

Celebrating Diversity: Greek American Heritage Month

March is Greek and Greek American Heritage Month. We recognize the many contributions Greeks and Greek Americans have made and continue to make to our diverse society. New academic conversations and collaborations have begun. To find out more, we invite you to virtually stop by these online resources:

A new publication sparking great interest among the academic Greek American community is Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters an open online journal edited by Professor Yiorgos Anagnostou of Ohio State University.
Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Queens College with a new director, Professor Gerasimus Katsan, European Languages & Literatures, Queens College.
The Hellenic American Project directed by Professor Nicholas Alexiou, Sociology Dept., Queens College, documenting through oral histories an understanding of the Greek American community.

Below are a few of our newer acquisitions. Other publications of interest may be found in Libguides for Modern Greek Language and Literature and Greek American Studies.

The Greek Orthodox Church in America by Alexander Kitroeff

Publication Date: 2020-06-15
“In this sweeping history, Alexander Kitroeff shows how the Greek Orthodox Church in America has functioned as much more than a religious institution, becoming the focal point in the lives of the country’s million-plus Greek immigrants and their descendants.”

Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary by Gedgaudaite, Kristina

Publication Date: 2022
“…examines the memories that shaped Asia Minor refugee identity, focusing on the ways in which these memories continue to reverberate in contemporary Greek culture.”

Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics by Papanikolaou, Dēmētrēs

Publication Date: 2021
“This book establishes a cinematic and cultural history of Greece during the last difficult decade. It focuses on key films from the post-2009 ‘New’ or ‘Weird Wave’ of Greek cinema, proposing the Greek Weird Wave as a paradigmatic cinema movement of biopolitical realism.”

Films on the Greek American experience include:

The Journey: The Greek American Dream

Aavailable on: Internet, in English.
“A work of compelling visual and audial power,..This is public history of high professional caliber, a product of collaboration between award-winning filmmaker Maria Iliou and historian Alexander Kitroeff.”

Ludlow Greek Americans in the Colorado Coal War

Available on: Vimeo
The story of the Ludlow Massacre and the Ten Day War in 1914 Colorado with a special focus on the Greek strikers and their leader Louis Tikas.

Greek American Radicals: the Untold Story

Publication Date: 2013
Available on: Vimeo
“Focusing from the Great Depression to the demise of ethnic radicalism in the 50s, the documentary Greek-American Radicals: the Untold Story brings forth an alternative vision of Greek-American history that highlights the transformations and multiple interrelations between ethnicity, class and radicalism.”

Celebrating Diversity: Women’s History Month Resources

Resources for Women’s History Month by Nancy Foasberg, Librarian for Women and Gender Studies

The QC Library celebrates Women’s History Month in March by gathering and presenting resources related to a specific aspect of women’s history. Last year’s guide focused on women’s suffrage and voting rights, a theme designated by the National Women’s History Alliance.

The Women’s History Month 2022 guide features resources related to the history of reproductive rights. While not only women need access to reproductive health care, the history of reproductive rights is essential to women’s history.

We also acknowledge the reproductive rights of transgender people and plan to highlight resources related to transgender health care in a future guide.

The guide covers a broad range of issues related to reproductive rights, including abortion, birth control, sex education, childbirth practices, and coercive “population control.”

Documentary film:The Abortion Hotline(2016). In Chile, where abortion remains illegal and punishable by imprisonment, we follow a group of young activists who put their lives at risk to run an underground abortion hotline.

Book: Reproductive Rights and the State: Getting the Birth Control, RU-48, and the Gardasil Vaccine to the U.S. Market (2013). Reproductive Rights and the State: Getting the Birth Control, RU-486, and Morning-After Pills and the Gardasil Vaccine to the U.S. Market tackles a subject that remains controversial more than 60 years after “the pill”; was approved for use in the United States. The first book to examine the politicization of the FDA approval process for reproductive drugs, this study maps the hard-fought battles over the four major drugs currently on the U.S. market.

Book: Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v Bell (2010). “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent “feebleminded and socially inadequate” people from having children. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned.

Book: The Search for an Abortionist: The Classic Study of How American Women Coped with Unwanted Pregnancy before Roe v. Wade (2014, reprinted from 1973). This eye-opening look at the abortion process prior to the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 is now more relevant than ever, with a new introduction by the author revisiting history that is still salient half a century later.

Primary Source Collection: Reproductive Rights: U.S. Supreme Court Cases. A list of significant cases of national prominence over the years. There are cases involving the reproductive rights of individuals, including the right to use contraception, plan a family, rear children, and gain access to reproductive healthcare. This site links to the full text of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

Celebrating Diversity: Black History Month Resources!

Resources for Black History Month by James Tasato Mellone, Historical Cultural and Social Sciences Librarian

The QC Library celebrates Black History Month this February 2022 by acknowledging ongoing African-American achievements despite the continuance of racial injustice and racism against the Black American community, both locally and nationally.

Our Black History Month 2022 guide shows several intellectual and artistic creations which, if knowledge is power, may offer some hope for future racial justice. Perhaps such creations can also help us see that the African-American experience is the American experience writ small and large, and that Black Lives Matter.

As part of our Africana Studies research guide, the Black History Month 2022 guide provides a selection of streaming videos, ebooks, as well as streaming music, performances & stories in African American studies. Here are a few highlights from the guide.

The Black Panthers Vanguard of the Revolution film poster

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (PBS, I hr 53 min) “Revisit the turbulent 1960s, when a new revolutionary culture emerged with the Black Panther Party at the vanguard. Stanley Nelson tells the vibrant story of a pivotal movement that feels timely all over again.”

MLK/FBI (2020, 1hr 46min) “In this virtuosic film, award-winning editor, and director Sam Pollard lays out a detailed account of the FBI surveillance that dogged King’s activism throughout the ’50s and ’60s, fueled by the racist and red-baiting paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover…”

Half in Shadow The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay book cover

Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay by Shanna Greene Benjamin (Publication Date: 2021) “Nellie Y. McKay (1930-2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters…best known for co-editing the canon-making Norton Anthology of African American Literature with Henry Louis Gates Jr….After her passing, new details about McKay’s life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her…”

Armstrong Now 2022: Artist-in-Residence Performances (Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens College) “Features world renowned Black artists responding creatively to the newly digitized Armstrong Archives….”

Celebrating Diversity: Native American Heritage Month Resources!

Resources for Native American Studies by James Tasato Mellone, Historical Cultural and Social Sciences Librarian

The QC Library celebrates Native American Heritage Month! It is fitting that this commemoration of Native American heritage occurs during Thanksgiving time. As such, we acknowledge that Native American history, culture, and society are intrinsic components of American life. Our recent climate crises have shown how essential it is for all Americans, indeed all of humanity, to adopt the physical and spiritual connections to the land that Native Americans have long held. Native American reverence for the earth is seen across the continent as first peoples advocate for clean water, land, and air.

As the leading advocacy cooperative for Native Americans, the National Congress of American Indians produces a State of Indian Nations report each year, as well as other publications like Tribal Nations and the United States: An Introduction, that can provide a window into current Native American life, including their environmental advocacy. For instance, we can learn that the more than 570 tribal nations of the United States inhabit reservations and trust land areas which encompass about 100 million acres, enough to make Native land equivalent to a fourth largest state in the U. S.

As part of our Native American Studies research guide, our Native American Heritage Month 2021: Resources guide provides a selection of QC ebooks, and links to materials in arts & culture, as well as on history, politics & governance. Here are some highlights!

Footprints of Hopi History by Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, T. J. Ferguson, Chip Colwell (Editors)

Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory by Robert Nichols

Treaties Still Matter, The Dakota Access Pipeline (Smithsonian)

Sing the Water Song

Celebrating Diversity: Italian American Heritage Month Highlights

Research Services Librarian Alexandra de Luise, liaison for Italian American Studies, presents highlights from the Italian American Studies Guide.

The month of October has been designated Italian American Heritage month. Although overlapping with Hispanic Heritage month, it was chosen in 1989 by presidential decree to overlap with Columbus Day on October 11th. For many, it is a time to reflect on Italian Americans’ many contributions and to enrich their understanding through lectures, readings and events. It is also a time to explore through publications and media outlets the changes and new attitudes felt in the field by this group as they touch on its history, sociology, art, culture and literature.

For a few years now, Italian American authors have been exploring new directions in their scholarship which can be best understood from watching a recent segment of Italics (Television for the Italian American Experience a monthly presentation co-produced in collaboration with the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute). In the video. Queens College Professor and the Dean of the John D. Calandra Institute Anthony Julian Tamburri, as well as Queens College Distinguished Professor of Italian American Studies Dr. Fred Gardaphé, are in conversation with Calandra’s Director of Academic and Cultural Programs, Dr. Joseph Sciorra, and York College Professor Dr. Donna Chirico. As leaders in their fields and from their broad and wide-reaching perspectives, they discuss what they see as a greater emphasis on transnationalism, gender, sexuality, whiteness and colonialism. Current day scholarship is leaning towards a better understanding of our past, to help explain our emigration, immigration and human experiences. Here are some books and media productions that bear this out:

Books

Migrant Marketplaces by Elizabeth Zanoni
Call Number: GT2850 .Z36 2018ISBN: 9780252041655
Publication Date: 2018′ Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs–a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires–Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity.’

Whom We Shall Welcome : Italian Americans and Immigration Reform, 1945-1965 by Battisti, Danielle
Call Number: onlineISBN: 0823286347
Publication Date: 2019 ‘Danielle Battisti looks at efforts by Italian American organizations to foster Italian immigration along with the lobbying efforts of Italian Americans to change the quota laws. While Italian Americans (and other white ethnics) had attained virtual political and social equality with many other groups of older-stock Americans by the end of the war, Italians continued to be classified as undesirable immigrants.”

The Divo and the Duce by Giorgio Bertellini
Call Number: onlineISBN: 9780520301368
Publication Date: 2019
‘Giorgio Bertellini’s work on Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority. Co-winner of the Italian American Studies 2020 book award.’

Napoli/New York/Hollywood by Giuliana Muscio Call Number: OnlineISBN: 0823279405Publication Date: 2018-10-30‘Napoli/New York/Hollywood is an absorbing investigation of the significant impact that Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors–and the southern Italian stage traditions they embodied–have had on the history of Hollywood cinema and American media, from 1895 to the present day. Included are such well-known directors and actors as Francis Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase, Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.’

Featured Media and Websites

i-Italy ‘A guide to everything Italian in America.” A fascinating bilingual blog/magazine/website of information and video clips, the project of the John D Calandra Italian American Institute.

The Italian Americans. Well-known series shown on the Public Broadcasting System. With Stanley Tucci, narrator.; Ark Media (Firm) production company.; WETA-TV (Television station : Washington, D.C.) production company. 2014

Episode 1. La Famiglia
Episode 2 Becoming Americans 1910-1930
Episode 3. Loyal Americans 1930-1945
Episode 4. The American Dream 1945 – today

Italian American Studies Association (formerly American Italian Historical Assn.) Association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of the culture, history, literature, sociology, psychology, demography, folklore, and politics of Italians in America.

Italics, Television for the Italian American Experience. The Italian American magazine of CUNYTV, the online television program, produced by the John D Calandra Italian American Institute, hosted by Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute.

Celebrating Diversity: LGBTQ+ Pride Month

To celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride Month in June 2021, the Library is showcasing a research guide on Pride curated by Prof. Leila Walker, Digital Scholarship Librarian, which features ebooks and other e-resources. Check out these resources and join us for a virtual celebration at CUNY Pridefest at Queens College on June 25.

Some History and Background

Each year in June, we celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride and commemorate the June 28, 1969, Stonewall Uprising. At that time, when homosexuality was a criminal offense, the Stonewall Inn was one of the most popular gay bars in New York City, and it was subjected to frequent police raids. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the bar; the powerful resistance to the raid, the ensuing riots, and the commemoration of the uprising the following June are often considered the origins of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.

As a queer woman, Pride month is personal for me. While June is a time to celebrate the joy, pride, power, and diversity of LGBTQ+ people and our history, it can also be a very stressful time of year for many of us. June is the month when we remember the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. June is also the month when Supreme Court decisions are traditionally handed down: in June 2003, the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas legalized same-sex sexual activity across the US; in June 2015, the Supreme Court held state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional in Obergefell v. Hodges; in June 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission that owners of public accommodations can refuse service to gay people on religious grounds. This year, the Court’s decision in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia is expected any day. That ruling will determine whether a Catholic child welfare organization can refuse to recommend gay and lesbian couples as foster parents. Each of these decisions affects whether and how we are legally allowed to enter into familial relationships; each of these decisions feels like a ruling on my humanity.

As a queer librarian, Pride month is especially personal for me, because the archival mission, the mission of organizing and making available resources about LGBTQ+ pride and history, is so urgently necessary to the ongoing formation of my community. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in The Epistemology of the Closet in 1990, in a passage that immediately resonated with me as a young lesbian, gay people are people “who seldom grow up in gay families; who are exposed to their culture’s, if not their parents’, high ambient homophobia long before either they or those who care for them know that they are among those who most urgently need to define themselves against it; who have with difficulty and always belatedly to patch together from fragments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance” (p. 81). Growing up, usually, outside of queer communities, we must work to seek them out. Thus the particular importance of LGBTQ+ community centers, archives, and oral history projects, through which we belatedly learn (and create) a collective history.

This archival impulse is compounded by the monumental loss of gay community to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the immeasurable loss of human lives and collective knowledge. June of 2021 marks the 40th anniversary of the first known cases of the disease that would eventually be known as HIV/AIDS. As government agencies refused to act, LGBTQ+ communities came together to educate each other, care for each other, fight for change, and remember lost loved ones in memorials and works of art. (The struggle for same-sex marriage gained urgency in this crisis as well, as gay couples with no legally recognized relationship were denied the rights to hospital visits or inheritance; Sarah Schulman traces how those legal lacunae shaped the development of New York City in The Gentrification of the Mind.)

I hope that you find in these resources a celebration of LGBTQ+ joy, fabulousness, and community, and an acknowledgment of the work that is left to be done.

Resource Highlights!

The Gay Metropolis by Charles Kaiser

ISBN: 0802147208

Publication Date: 2019-06-04

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of a Lambda Literary Award, The Gay Metropolis is a landmark saga of struggle and triumph that was instantly recognized as the most authoritative and substantial work of its kind. Now, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprisings, Charles Kaiser has brought this history into the twenty-first century. In this new edition he covers the three court cases that lead to the revolutionary legalization of gay marriage in America, as well as shifts toward inclusion in mainstream pop culture, with the Oscar-winning films Brokeback Mountain and Call Me By Your Name. Filled with astounding anecdotes and searing tales of heartbreak and transformation, it provides a decade-by-decade account of the rise and acceptance of gay life and identity since the 1940s. From the making of West Side Story to the catastrophic era of AIDS, and with a dazzling cast of characters–including Leonard Bernstein, Montgomery Clift, Alfred Hitchcock, John F. Kennedy, and RuPaul–this is a vital telling of American history.

Trans Bodies, Trans Selves by Laura Erickson-Schroth (Editor)

ISBN: 9780199325351

Publication Date: 2014-06-10

There is no one way to be transgender. Transgender and gender non-conforming people have many different ways of understanding their gender identities. Only recently have sex and gender been thought of as separate concepts, and we have learned that sex (traditionally thought of as physical or biological) is as variable as gender (traditionally thought of as social). While trans people share many common experiences, there is immense diversity within trans communities.

And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson; Peter Parnell; Henry Cole (Illustrator)

ISBN: 1481446959

Publication Date: 2015-06-02

The heartwarming true story of two penguins who create a nontraditional family is now available in a sturdy board book edition. At the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo, two penguins named Roy and Silo were a little bit different from the others. But their desire for a family was the same. And with the help of a kindly zookeeper, Roy and Silo got the chance to welcome a baby penguin of their very own. In time for the tenth anniversary of And Tango Makes Three, this Classic Board Book edition is the perfect size for small hands.

Alexander Street Press LGBT Studies in Video

LGBT Studies in Video is a cinematic survey of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as well as the cultural and political evolution of the LGBT community. This first-of-its-kind collection features award-winning documentaries, interviews, archival footage, and select feature films exploring LGBT history, gay culture and subcultures, civil rights, marriage equality, LGBT families, AIDS, transgender issues, religious perspectives on homosexuality, global comparative experiences, and other topics.

Carol (available through June 30)

In this achingly beautiful drama, a female department-store employee in 1950s New York falls for a woman stuck in a loveless marriage. Unfortunately, the latter’s husband threatens to take their child if the relationship between the two women continues.

Moonlight (available through June 30)

MOONLIGHT is the tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.

Celebrating Diversity: Jewish American Heritage Month

To celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month in May 2021, the Library is showcasing a research guide for Jewish American studies, curated by our Jewish Studies librarian Prof. Izabella Taler, which features streaming videos and other e-resources!

Some History & Background

As noted on the Library of Congress’ commemoration site, Jewish American Heritage Month began with President Carter’s proclamation in April 1980 in “which he spoke about the bountiful contributions made by the Jews to the culture and history of the United States.” The month has been honored ever since as the Jewish American community has continued to change and expand.

According to the American Jewish Yearbook, by 2019 the US Jewish population was almost 7 million, with Jews of Color representing at least 6% of American Jews. The states with the largest Jewish population include New York (25%), California (17%), Florida (9%), and New Jersey (8%). More information can be found at this terrific site on Jewish American Heritage Month created by the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and other federal agencies.

Resource Highlights!

Our guide for Jewish American Heritage Month highlights various digital resources on Jewish American studies available for research and entertainment!

Read articles in Jewish American newspapers like the Baltimore Jewish Star and the New York Jewish Week in our Ethnic Newswatch database
Consult our collection of digital books on a variety of topics in Jewish Studies by searching in OneSearch
And finally, watch and enjoy streaming videos, such as:

The Chosen – acclaimed film about two Jewish boys in Brooklyn

The Longing: The Forgotten Jews of South America– award-winning documentary

RBG – revealing documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Celebrating Diversity: Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month

To celebrate Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month in May 2021, the Library is showcasing a research guide on Asian/Pacific American studies curated by our Asian Studies librarian Prof. Joan Xu, which features ebooks and other e-resources!

Some History & Background

In 1978, Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month was first declared to commemorate two important milestones in Asian/Pacific American history: the arrival in the United States of the first Japanese immigrants (May 7, 1843) and contributions of Chinese workers to the building of the transcontinental railroad, completed May 10, 1869.

Asian Americans is a term for immigrants who came from the continent of Asia, and for the modern Americans who are descended from them. Asian immigrants are diverse in their ethnicity, religion, and politics, but they share the experience of leaving their homes to come to the U. S. to make a new life, enriching it by bringing their varied cultures with them. Asian alone-or-in-combination residents in the United States are the fastest-growing race group from 2000 to 2019. The estimated number of Asian Americans in 2019 was almost 23 million (US Census Bureau and Asian Pacific American Heritage Month).

Resource Highlights!

Here are some highlights from our research guide for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month – digital archives, streaming videos, and ebooks!

Smithsonian Asian American Arts Spotlight – Digital archive about American artists of Asian heritage
How the First Asian American Marine Officer Overcame Racism – Streaming video about Lieutenant Chew-Een Lee

Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience by Angelo N. Ancheta – New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 2006

Angelo N. Ancheta demonstrates how United States civil rights laws have been framed by a black-white model of race that typically ignores the experiences of other groups, including Asian Americans.

A Thousand Miles of Dreams by Sasha Su-Ling Welland – Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007

A Thousand Miles of Dreams is an evocative and intimate biography of two Chinese sisters who took very different paths in their quest to be independent women.

Waterman by David Davis – Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2015

Waterman is the first comprehensive biography of Duke Kahanamoku (1890-1968): swimmer, surfer, Olympic gold medalist, Hawaiian icon, waterman. Long before Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz made their splashes in the pool, Kahanamoku emerged from the backwaters of Waikiki to become America’s first superstar Olympic swimmer.

Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 by Roger Daniels – Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011.

“In this important and masterful synthesis of the Chinese and Japanese experience in America, historian Roger Daniels provides a new perspective on the significance of Asian immigration to the United States.”