Androscoggin County is a county in the U.S. state of Maine. As of the 2020 census, the county's population was 111,139. Its county seat is Auburn and its most populous city is Lewiston.
Auburn is a city in south-central Maine, within the United States. The city serves as the county seat of Androscoggin County. The population was 24,061 at the 2020 census. Auburn and its sister city Lewiston are known locally as the Twin Cities or Lewiston–Auburn (L–A).
Lewiston is the second most populous city in the U.S. state of Maine, with the city's population at 37,121 as of the 2020 United States Census. The city lies halfway between Augusta, the state's capital, and Portland, the state's most populous city. It is one-half of the Lewiston–Auburn Metropolitan Statistical Area, commonly referred to as "L/A." or "L-A." Lewiston exerts a significant impact upon the diversity, religious variety, commerce, education, and economic power of Maine. It is known for having an overall low cost of living, substantial access to medical care, and a low violent-crime rate. In recent years, the city of Lewiston has also seen a spike in economic and social growth. While the dominant language spoken in the city is English, it is home to a significant Somali population as well as the largest French-speaking population in the United States while it is second to St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, in percentage of speakers.
Somalis in the United Kingdom include British citizens and residents born in or with ancestors from Somalia. The United Kingdom (UK) is home to the largest Somali community in Europe, with an estimated 108,000 Somali-born immigrants residing in the UK in 2018 according to the Office for National Statistics. The majority of these live in England, with the largest number found in London. Smaller Somali communities exist in Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Sheffield and Cardiff.
The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion' is a 2003 documentary directed by Ziad Hamzeh. It was filmed in the town of Lewiston, Maine.
The history of the area comprising the U.S. state of Maine spans thousands of years, measured from the earliest human settlement, or approximately two hundred, measured from the advent of U.S. statehood in 1820. The present article will concentrate on the period of European contact and after.
The Somali diaspora or Qurbajoogta refers to Somalis who were born in Greater Somalia and reside in areas of the world that they were not born in. The civil war in Somalia greatly increased the size of the Somali diaspora, as many Somalis moved from Greater Somalia primarily to Europe, North America, Southern Africa and Australia. There are also small Somali populations in other pockets of Europe and Asia. The UN estimates that in 2015, approximately 2 million people from Somalia were living outside of the country's borders.
The Somali Bantus are a Bantu ethnic minority group in Somalia who primarily reside in the southern part of the country, primarily near the Jubba and Shabelle rivers. The Somali Bantus are descendants of enslaved peoples from various Bantu ethnic groups from Southeast Africa, particularly from Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania. The East African slave trade was not eliminated until the early parts of the 20th century.
A sanctuary city is a municipality that limits or denies its cooperation with the national government in enforcing immigration law.
Somali Americans are Americans of Somali ancestry. The first ethnic Somalis to arrive in the U.S. were sailors who came in the 1920s from British Somaliland. They were followed by students pursuing higher studies in the 1960s and 1970s, by the late 1970s through the late 1980s and early 1990s more Somalis arrived. However, it was not until the mid and late 1990s when the civil war in Somalia broke out that the majority of Somalis arrived in the United States. The Somali community in the U.S. is now among the largest in the Somali diaspora.
Somali Bantus are an ethnic group from Somalia. A significant community of them reside in Maine; as of 2012, there were around 1,000 in Lewiston.
The West End is a downtown neighborhood in Portland, Maine. It is located on the western side of Portland's peninsula primarily on Bramhall Hill and is noted for its architecture and history. The neighborhood is home to many late 19th- and early 20th-century homes and, in 2010, it was called "one of the best preserved Victorian neighborhoods in the country". The Western Promenade, a park laid out in 1836, overlooks the forests and small settlements of Southwestern Maine, along with the distant White Mountains. Other historic structures include 68 High Street, The Gothic House, Brown House, Butler House, Ingraham House, Morrill Mansion and the Minott House.
Sudanese Americans are Americans of Sudanese ancestry or Sudanese who have American citizenship. Sudanese Americans may also include children born in the United States to an American parent and a Sudanese parent. Many Sudanese immigrated to the United States in the 1990s as war refugees, escaping from the second civil war. In the 2012 American Community Survey, 48,763 people identified as Sudanese or Sudanese Americans who—or whose ancestors—have emigrated from their native land to the U.S. in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
Paul Richard LePage is American businessman and politician who served as the 74th governor of Maine from 2011 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the mayor of Waterville, Maine, from 2004 to 2011 and as a city councilor for Waterville from 1998 to 2002.
ACT for America, also referred to as ACT! for America, founded in 2007, is a US based advocacy group that stands against what it perceives as "the threat of radical Islam" to Americans. The group has been characterized by some media outlets as anti-Muslim.
Although the Ku Klux Klan is most often associated with white supremacy, the revived Klan of the 1920s was also anti-Catholic. In the U.S. state of Maine, with a small African-American population but a burgeoning number of Acadian, French-Canadian and Irish immigrants, the Klan revival of the 1920s was a Protestant nativist movement directed against the Catholic minority as well as African-Americans. For a period in the mid-1920s, the Klan captured elements of the Maine Republican Party, even helping to elect a governor, Ralph Owen Brewster.
Jews have been living in Maine, a state in the northeastern United States, for 200 years, with significant Jewish communities in Bangor as early as the 1840s and in Portland since the 1880s. The arrival of Susman Abrams in 1785 was followed by a history of immigration and settlement that parallels the history of Jewish immigration to the United States.
In late January and early February 2017, during protests against Executive Order 13769, commonly referred to as the “Muslim ban,” thousands of people gathered at various airports in the United States and around the world to protest the Trump administration’s attempt to prevent the returning of refugees and other visitors from seven countries considered by the administration to be unsafe. According to various sources, more than two thousand people were at the protest at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York City with other protests appearing at significant international airports and other important sites around the United States. Protests continued daily and internationally through February 6. Protests also continued after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against parts of the travel ban.
Safiya Said Khalid is a Somali-American politician who served as a member of the Lewiston, Maine City Council.
