The New Disability History: American Perspectives

Thoughtful, scholarly collection of essays - would be good resource for libraries and university courses on disability history/studies. Baynton's essay "Disability and the justification of inequality in American History" is especially interesting, and has implications for all oppressed and exploited groups in the history of the "land of the free". Cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary perspectives included. Profiles of people like Helen Keller and many cites of Americans with disabilities, but does not purport to be a book written by people with disabilities about our American Experience. Rather, it is an academic text about the intersection of the American Experience with Disability. Finally, there was interestingly little coverage about eugenics and the nearly century-long process of sterilizing institutionalized people with "undesirable characteristics", which included people with Downs Syndrome and other "hereditary" disorders, criminals (mostly men), people with mental illness (mostly women). Many localities and authorities considered race to be a defect not desired in the American gene pool, so it would not be surprising to find many minorities among the count of those involuntarily sterilized. Since the pseudoscience of Eugenics was so embraced by American academics, philanthropists, politicians - as well as the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany - it deserves more than passing reference in separate essays. People must grasp what happened then in the American psyche so that it doesn't happen again - especially in this era of genetic testing and manipulation, and euthanasia / assisted suicide. Otherwise, I would recommend it as one of several texts about disability history.