Claiming Disability captures this moment in the first comprehensive examination of disability studies as a field of inquiry. Arguing that disability studies takes for its subject matter not simply the variations that exist in human behavior, appearance, functioning, sensory acuity, and cognitive processing, but the meaning we make of those variations, this work offers both a passionate challenge to status quo definitions of disability and a methodology for reexamining it.

    Seeming to criminalize disability and thus offering a visceral example of discrimination, these "ugly laws" have become a sort of shorthand for oppression in disability studies, law, and the arts.In this watershed study of the ugly laws, Susan M. Schweik uncovers the murky history behind the laws, situating the varied legislation in its historical context and exploring in detail what the laws meant. Illustrating how the laws join the history of the disabled and the poor, Schweik not only gives the reader a deeper understanding of the ugly laws and the cities where they were generated, she locates the laws at a crucial intersection of evolving and unstable concepts of race, nation, sex, class, and gender. Moreover, she explores the history of resistance to the ordinances, using the often harrowing life stories of those most affected by their passage. Moving to the laws' more recent history, Schweik analyzes the shifting cultural memory of the ugly laws, examining how they have been used--and misused--by academics, activists, artists, lawyers, and legislators.

    Clear, cogent, compelling analyses of the tension between the 'social model' of disability and the material details of impairment; of identity politics and unstable identities; of capability rights and human interdependence; of disability and law, disability as masquerade, disability and sexuality, disability and democracy---they're all here, in beautifully crafted and intellectually startling essays. Disability Theory is a field-defining book: and if you're curious about what 'disability' has to do with 'theory,' it's just the book you've been waiting for, too."---Michael Bérubé, Pennsylvania State University "Disability Theory is magisterially written, thoroughly researched, and polemically powerful. It will be controversial in a number of areas and will probably ruffle feathers both in disability studies as well as in realms of cultural theory. And that's all to the good."---Michael Davidson, University of California, San Diego"Not only is Disability Theory a groundbreaking contribution to disability studies, it is also a bold, ambitious and much needed revision to a number of adjacent and overlapping fields including cultural studies, literary theory, queer theory, and critical race studies. Siebers has written a powerful manifesto that calls theory to account and forces readers to think beyond our comfort zones."---Helen Deutsch, University of California, Los AngelesIntelligent, provocative, and challenging, Disability Theory revolutionizes the terrain of theory by providing indisputable evidence of the value and utility that a disability studies perspective can bring to key critical and cultural questions. Tobin Siebers persuasively argues that disability studies transfigures basic assumptions about identity, ideology, language, politics, social oppression, and the body. At the same time, he advances the emerging field of disability studies by putting its core issues into contact with signal thinkers in cultural studies, literary theory, queer theory, gender studies, and critical race theory.

    People with disabilities forging the newest and last human rights movement of the century.

    A long, painful experience of hearing intolerance has generally kept Deaf culture fairly closed to outsiders, even sympathetic ones. But now Padden & Humphries...have written a charming small book that invites the rest of us at least part way in...A most welcome addition to that very small shelf of books that truly illuminate the experience of being deaf.--Beryl Lieff Benderly, Psychology TodayPrefaceIntroductionLearning to be deafImages of being A different center Living in others' world A changing consciousness The meaning of sound Historically created livesReferencesIndex

    Davis argues forcefully against 'ableist' discourse and for a complete recasting of the category of disability itself. Enforcing Normalcy surveys the emergence of a cluster of concepts around the term 'normal' as these matured in Western Europe and the United States over the past 250 years. Linking such notions to the concurrent emergence of discourses about the nation, Davis shows how the modern nation-state contracted its identity on the backs not only of colonized subjects, but of its physically disabled minority. In a fascinating chapter on contemporary cultural theory, Davis explores the pitfalls of privileging the figure of sight in conceptualizing the nature of textuality. And in the treatment of nudes and fragmented bodies in Western art, he shows how the ideal of physical wholeness is both demanded and denied in the classical aesthetics of representation. Enforcing Normalcy redraws the boundaries of political and cultural discourse. By insisting that disability be added to the familiar triad of race, class, and gender, the book challenges progressives to expand the limits of their thinking about human oppression.

    Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal.Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits.Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.

    Temple Grandin's voice of experience is back to give parents and teachers specific, practical advice on helping young people on the autism spectrum. This collection of articles, written from 2000-present as an exclusive column in the national award-winning magazine, Autism Aspergers Digest, offers Temples invaluable personal and professional insights, from inside the world of autism, about autism. Temple voices her views on a wide variety of topics ranging from the nonverbal child to social functioning, early intervention to adult issues. The articles have been updated and Temple has added fresh commentary on the topics.

    His full accounting does honor to the medical professionals around the country who've risked their lives to fight the virus, revealing America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential.

    America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.Over the course of five centuries--from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials--our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies--every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.

    There are no fences, no guards, no locked gates. But McLean Hospital is a mental institution-one of the most famous, most elite, and once most luxurious in America. McLean "alumni" include Olmsted himself, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, James Taylor and Ray Charles, as well as (more secretly) other notables from among the rich and famous. In its "golden age," McLean provided as genteel an environment for the treatment of mental illness as one could imagine. But the golden age is over, and a downsized, downscale McLean-despite its affiliation with Harvard University-is struggling to stay afloat. Gracefully Insane, by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, is a fascinating and emotional biography of McLean Hospital from its founding in 1817 through today. It is filled with stories about patients and doctors: the Ralph Waldo Emerson prot'g' whose brilliance disappeared along with his madness; Anne Sexton's poetry seminar, and many more. The story of McLean is also the story of the hopes and failures of psychology and psychotherapy; of the evolution of attitudes about mental illness, of approaches to treatment, and of the economic pressures that are making McLean-and other institutions like it-relics of a bygone age. This is a compelling and often oddly poignant reading for fans of books like Plath's The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (both inspired by their author's stays at McLean) and for anyone interested in the history of medicine or psychotherapy, or the social history of New England.

    In the age of austerity, it's disabled people who are hardest hit, affecting over 3.7 million people. This is in addition to a situation in which half of those in poverty are either disabled or living with a disabled person.In Crippled, leading commentator Frances Ryan tells the story of those most affected by this devastating regime, people who have been too often been silenced. This includes the tetraplegic living in a first floor flat forced to crawl down flights of stairs because the council doesn't provide accessible housing; the young girl forced to sleep in her wheelchair and admitted to hospital with malnutrition because cuts mean she no longer had a carer to help her get to bed or cook; or the Londoner with schizophrenia found 'fit for work', and with nothing to live on was found dead at home three months later.Through these personal stories the book shows the scale of the crisis, while also showing how the disabled community is fighting back. It is a passionate demand for the recognition of disability rights and a call for an end to austerity policies that disproportionately affect those most in need.

    Nothing About Us Without Us is the first book in the literature on disability to provide a theoretical overview of disability oppression that shows its similarities to, and differences from, racism, sexism, and colonialism. Charlton's analysis is illuminated by interviews he conducted over a ten-year period with disability rights activists throughout the Third World, Europe, and the United States. Charlton finds an antidote for dependency and powerlessness in the resistance to disability oppression that is emerging worldwide. His interviews contain striking stories of self-reliance and empowerment evoking the new consciousness of disability rights activists. As a latecomer among the world's liberation movements, the disability rights movement will gain visibility and momentum from Charlton's elucidation of its history and its political philosophy of self-determination, which is captured in the title of his book. Nothing About Us Without Us expresses the conviction of people with disabilities that they know what is best for them. Charlton's combination of personal involvement and theoretical awareness assures greater understanding of the disability rights movement.

    Told through the words of the people who lived it, The Fall of the House of Dixie illuminates the way a war undertaken to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on the country was as strong and lasting as that of our first.   In 1860 the American South was a vast, wealthy, imposing region where a small minority had amassed great political power and enormous fortunes through a system of forced labor. The South’s large population of slaveless whites almost universally supported the basic interests of plantation owners, despite the huge wealth gap that separated them. By the end of 1865 these structures of wealth and power had been shattered. Millions of black people had gained their freedom, many poorer whites had ceased following their wealthy neighbors, and plantation owners were brought to their knees, losing not only their slaves but their political power, their worldview, their very way of life. This sea change was felt nationwide, as the balance of power in Congress, the judiciary, and the presidency shifted dramatically and lastingly toward the North, and the country embarked on a course toward equal rights.   Levine captures the many-sided human drama of this story using a huge trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and more. In The Fall of the House of Dixie, the true stakes of the Civil War become clearer than ever before, as slaves battle for their freedom in the face of brutal reprisals; Abraham Lincoln and his party turn what began as a limited war for the Union into a crusade against slavery by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; poor southern whites grow increasingly disillusioned with fighting what they have come to see as the plantation owners’ war; and the slave owners grow ever more desperate as their beloved social order is destroyed, not just by the Union Army, but also from within. When the smoke clears, not only Dixie but all of American society is changed forever.   Brilliantly argued and engrossing, The Fall of the House of Dixie is a sweeping account of the destruction of the old South during the Civil War, offering a fresh perspective on the most colossal struggle in our history and the new world it brought into being.Praise for The Fall of the House of Dixie   “This is the Civil War as it is seldom seen. . . . A portrait of a country in transition . . . as vivid as any that has been written.”—The Boston Globe  “An absorbing social history . . . For readers whose Civil War bibliography runs to standard works by Bruce Catton and James McPherson, [Bruce] Levine’s book offers fresh insights.”—The Wall Street Journal  “More poignantly than any book before, The Fall of the House of Dixie shows how deeply intertwined the Confederacy was with slavery, and how the destruction of both made possible a ‘second American revolution’ as far-reaching as the first.”—David W. Blight, author of American Oracle  “Splendidly colorful . . . Levine recounts this tale of Southern institutional rot with the ease and authority born of decades of study.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)   “A deep, rich, and complex analysis of the period surrounding and including the American Civil War.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

    The first U.S. history survey to incorporate sustained attention to cultural history, the text is also known for its innovative coverage of public health, the environment, and the West--including Native American history.The Sixth Edition presents increased global coverage and a new comparative feature, "Beyond America: Global Interactions," which provides an international context for significant developments in the United States. A range of student oriented pedagogical features, including focus questions and an online glossary, makes this edition even more accessible. The authors continue to explore the enduring vision of the American people, a vision they describe as "a shared determination to live up to the values that give meaning to America."