Armenian Americans ( , '' amerikahayer '' ) are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry . They form the second largest community of the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia . The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the United States took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . Thousands of Armenians settled in the United States following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s , the Adana Massacre of 1909 , and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire . Since the 1950s many Armenians from the Middle East ( especially from Lebanon , Syria , Iran , Iraq , Egypt and Turkey ) migrated to America as a result of political instability in the region . It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons
Hamidian massacres
Hamidian massacres
Armenian Americans