The National Park Service (NPS) has no official mandate to interpret the lives of people with disabilities across the park system. To address this lack, the NPS Park History Program is creating the Disability History Handbook, a multi-authored anthology slated for publication in late 2024.Read More
It is time for a Smithsonian National Museum of Disability History and Culture. Considering the fact that one in four Americans, or approximately 61 million people, is disabled, a national museum would acknowledge disability as an essential component of American life. Read More
The Pennhurst Haunted Asylum and the Pennhurst Museum, operated by Pennhurst LLC in collaboration with the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance (PMPA), exist side-by-side on the grounds of the shuttered Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City, Pennsylvania. The sites might seem to have opposite goals: one to frighten and entertain, the other to educate about past wrongs. Read More
Founded in 1852 as the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children, Elwyn is the oldest continuously operating educational facility for people with intellectual disabilities in the United States. Today, headquartered just outside Philadelphia, it is a large multi-state provider of community-based and residential supports to people with a wide range of disabilities. Read More
Many countries have erected memorials to the state-sponsored suffering of their citizens, such as the Gedenkstaette memorial in Dachau, Germany and Freedom Park in Pretoria, South Africa. For more than 150 years, millions of Americans with developmental disabilities were segregated, isolated, neglected, and abused in overcrowded, state-funded institutions, as poignantly detailed in disability rights scholar Burton Blatt’s Christmas in Purgatory.Read More
For nearly four years, I have collaborated with the National Park Service to embrace the culture and history of people with disabilities represented by its 400+ parks, historic sites, monuments, and battlefields. During my summer 2020 internship with the NPS, I contributed to this effort by writing an annotated bibliography on American disability history. Read More
As the days grow darker and the leaves start to turn, the atmosphere lends itself to spooky stories. Like other colleges, Gallaudet University, the world’s only university designed to be barrier-free for deaf and hard of hearing students, has its share of ghost stories. Read More
Editor’s note: this is the second in a two-part series based on a conversation between our Digital Media Editor, Nicole Belolan, and Jessica Martucci, a researcher at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
NB: How do you think this project defines or redefines disability, and who does the defining?Read More
Editor’s note: The post is the sixth in a series commissioned by The Public Historian that focuses on essays published in TPH that have been used effectively in the classroom. We welcome comments and further suggestions! If you have a TPH article that is a favorite in your classroom, please let us know.Read More
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