Global Americana Institute

Good Idea From Juan Cole

The classics of American thought and history have been little translated into Arabic. Worse, even when they have been translated, they have appeared in small editions and fairly quickly go out of print.. Worse still, the distribution system for Arabic books is poor, and there are few public libraries, so that many books that have been published in the past are no longer available to most readers. We have therefore begun a project to translate important books by great Americans and about America into Arabic, and to subsidize their publication so that they can be bought inexpensively. We are also subventing their distribution.