Although often overshadowed, women have always played a societal and political role in the Arab world. Some of them, unknown to the public at large, have even managed to break the shackles in.
Thousands of miles from home, families from present-day Syria and Lebanon rebuilt their lives from scratch in far-flung places across Iowa, the Dakotas and elsewhere in the Midwestern United States. They became homesteaders, peddlers and community leaders.