“An Invented Archive”: The Disability History Museum

Abstract

The September 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education included a special supplement on “Diversity in Academic Careers.” It focused primarily on race and ethnicity; sexual preference received minimal attention. No references were made, however, to disability, although disabled Americans can be said to comprise the largest single “minority group” in the United States. Consider the following: according to the 2000 U.S. Census, 49.7 million people, representing 19.3 percent of the 257.2 million people aged five and older in the civilian noninstitutionalized population (or almost one in five U.S. residents), lives with some type of long-lasting condition or disability.

Documenting Disability History in Western Pennsylvania

“…Relatively little exists that explores disability collections themselves, the work of gathering the physical and oral and digital materials that embody disability history, thus rendering our bodies-our lives, our presence, and our absence-visible within the context of history as a whole. Existing resources include Laurie Block's introduction to the Disability History Museum, an online project "conceived as a means to promote understanding by recovering, chronicling, and interpreting stories about the historical experience of people with disabilities," 11 as well as Meghan Rinn's article on the P. T. Barnum archives 12 and an article from archivists at the University of Toledo sharing their efforts to document disability history in Ohio. 13 Also of note is a white paper from the Disability History/Archives Consortium, an NEH-funded project that lasted from 2015 to 2018 with the intent of creating an online portal through which researchers could peruse disability history collections as reported by member institutions.…”