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 largest city in Maine and the most central city in Androscoggin County. 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 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.
Arab Americans are Americans of Arab ancestry. Arab Americans trace ancestry to any of the various waves of immigrants of the countries comprising the Arab World.
Frederick George Payne was an American businessman and politician. A member of the Republican Party, he served as a U.S. Senator from Maine from 1953 to 1959. He previously served as the 60th Governor of Maine from 1949 to 1952.
French Americans or Franco-Americans, are citizens or nationals of the United States who identify themselves with having full or partial French or French-Canadian heritage, ethnicity and/or ancestral ties. They include French-Canadian Americans, whose experience and identity differ from the broader community.
Benjamin Edward Bates IV was an American rail industrialist, textile tycoon and philanthropist. He was the wealthiest person in Maine from 1850 to 1878, and is considered to have introduced both the Efficiency and Taylorism movements to the economy of Maine.
The Great American Boycott, also called the Day Without an Immigrant, was a one-day boycott of United States schools and businesses by immigrants in the United States which took place on May 1, 2006.
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 Bantus are a Bantu origin 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.
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.
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.
Catherine Lowe Besteman is an abolitionist educator at Colby College, where she holds the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Chair in Anthropology. Her research and practice engage the public humanities to explore abolitionist possibilities in Maine. She has taught at that institution since 1994.
As of 2013, there were around 10,000 ethnic Somalis in Lewiston and Portland.
Waukegan riot of 1966 was a period of conflict between police and some residents of the town's predominantly African-American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods on the south side that occurred in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement.
Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine is a 2016 non-fiction book by Catherine L. Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Safiya Said Khalid is a Somali-American politician who served as a member of the Lewiston, Maine City Council.
Deqa Dhalac is a member of the Maine House of Representatives for the 120th District. A Somali emigrant, she served as the mayor of South Portland, Maine from 2021 to 2022, becoming the first African-born female mayor in the United States. Alongside Mana Abdi, she is the first Somali-American to serve as a Maine legislator.
