Disability & Accessibility : History

Disability history exists outside of the institutions, healers, and treatments it often brings to mind. It is a history where the disabled live not just as patients or cure-seekers, but rather as people living differently in the world - and it is also a history that helps define the fundamental concepts of identity, community, citizenship, and normality. The Oxford Handbook of Disability History is the first volume of its kind to represent this history and its global scale, from ancient Greece to British West Africa.

Designing Disability traces the emergence of an idea and an ideal - physical access for the disabled - through the evolution of the iconic International Symbol of Access (ISA). The book draws on design history, material culture and recent critical disability studies to examine not only the development of a design icon, but also the cultural history surrounding it.

In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people--families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day--who have experienced the impact of historical institutionalization. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of institutionalized people and the places that held them.

In this brave new theoretical approach to human physicality, Julie E. Maybee traces societal constructions of disability and impairment through Western history along three dimensions of embodiment: the personal body, the interpersonal body, and the institutional body. Each dimension has played a part in defining people as disabled and impaired in terms of employment, healthcare, education, and social and political roles. Because impairment and disability have been constructed along all three of these bodies, unmaking disability and making the future accessible will require restructuring Western institutions, including capitalism, changing how social roles are assigned, and transforming our deepest beliefs about impairment and disability to reconstruct people as capable.

In this updated edition, Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames expand their encyclopedic history of the struggle for disability rights in the United States, to include the past ten years of disability rights activism.The authors provide a probing analysis of such topics as deinstitutionalization, housing, health care, assisted suicide, employment, education, new technologies, disabled veterans, and disability culture.

Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann's lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society. Paralyzed from polio at eighteen months, Judy's struggle for equality began early in life. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a "fire hazard" to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher's license because of her paralysis, Judy's actions set a precedent that fundamentally improved rights for disabled people. As a young woman, Judy rolled her wheelchair through the doors of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco as a leader of the Section 504 Sit-In, the longest takeover of a governmental building in US history. Working with a community of over 150 disabled activists and allies, Judy successfully pressured the Carter administration to implement protections for disabled peoples' rights, sparking a national movement and leading to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement, Fred Pelka takes the slogan "Nothing about us without us" at face value. He presents the voices of disability rights activists who, in the period from 1950 to 1990, transformed how society viewed people with disabilities, and recounts how the various streams of the movement came together to push through the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Beginning with the stories of those who grew up with disabilities in the 1940s and '50s, the book traces how disability came to be seen as a political issue, and how people with disabilities, often isolated, institutionalized, and marginalized, forged a movement analogous to the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights movements, and fought for full and equal participation in American society.