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"Disabled Persons history United States."
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War's waste : rehabilitation in World War I America
With U.S. soldiers stationed around the world and engaged in multiple conflicts, Americans will be forced for the foreseeable future to come to terms with those permanently disabled in battle. At the moment, we accept rehabilitation as the proper social and cultural response to the wounded, swiftly returning injured combatants to their civilian lives. But this was not always the case, as the author reveals in this book. In it, she explains how, before entering World War I, the United States sought a way to avoid the enormous cost of providing injured soldiers with pensions, which it had done since the Revolutionary War. Emboldened by their faith in the new social and medical sciences, reformers pushed rehabilitation as a means to \"rebuild\" disabled soldiers, relieving the nation of a monetary burden and easing the decision to enter the Great War. The author's narrative moves from the professional development of orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists to the curative workshops, or hospital spaces where disabled soldiers learned how to repair automobiles as well as their own artificial limbs. The story culminates in the postwar establishment of the Veterans Administration, one of the greatest legacies to come out of the First World War.
Book
Polio and its aftermath : the paralysis of culture
It was not long ago that scientists proclaimed victory over polio, the dread disease of the 1950s. More recently polio resurfaced, not conquered at all, spreading across the countries of Africa. As we once again face the specter of this disease, along with other killers like AIDS and SARS, this powerful book reminds us of the personal cost, the cultural implications, and the historical significance of one of modern humanity's deadliest biological enemies. In Polio and Its Aftermath Marc Shell, himself a victim of polio, offers an inspired analysis of the disease. Part memoir, part cultural criticism and history, part meditation on the meaning of disease, Shell's work combines the understanding of a medical researcher with the sensitivity of a literary critic. He deftly draws a detailed yet broad picture of the lived experience of a crippling disease as it makes it way into every facet of human existence.
Polio and Its Aftermath conveys the widespread panic that struck as the disease swept the world in the mid-fifties. It captures an atmosphere in which polio vied with the Cold War as the greatest cause of unrest in North America--and in which a strange and often debilitating uncertainty was one of the disease's salient but least treatable symptoms. Polio particularly afflicted the young, and Shell explores what this meant to families and communities. And he reveals why, in spite of the worldwide relief that greeted Jonas Salk's vaccine as a miracle of modern science, we have much more to fear from polio now than we know.
eBook
Constructing Disability after the Great War
As Americans--both civilians and veterans--worked to determine the meanings of identity for blind veterans of World War I, they bound cultural constructs of blindness to all the emotions and contingencies of mobilizing and fighting the war, and healing from its traumas. Sighted Americans’ wartime rehabilitation culture centered blind soldiers and veterans in a mix of inspirational stories. Veterans worked to become productive members of society even as ableism confined their unique life experiences to a collection of cultural tropes that suggested they were either downcast wrecks of their former selves or were morally superior and relatively flawless as they overcame their disabilities and triumphantly journeyed toward successful citizenship. Sullivan investigates the rich lives of blind soldiers and veterans and their families to reveal how they confronted barriers, gained an education, earned a living, and managed their self-image while continually exposed to the public’s scrutiny of their success and failures.
eBook
Framing the moron
Many people are shocked upon discovering that tens of thousands of innocent persons in the United States were involuntarily sterilized, forced into institutions, and otherwise maltreated within the course of the eugenic movement (1900–30). Such social control efforts are easier to understand when we consider the variety of dehumanizing and fear-inducing rhetoric propagandists invoke to frame their potential victims. This book details the major rhetorical themes employed within the context of eugenic propaganda, drawing largely on original sources of the period. Early in the twentieth century the term “moron” was developed to describe the primary targets of eugenic control. This book demonstrates how the image of moronity in the United States was shaped by eugenicists. This book will be of interest not only to disability and eugenic scholars and historians, but to anyone who wants to explore the means by which pejorative metaphors are used to support social control efforts against vulnerable community groups.
eBook
The transformation of American health insurance : on the path to medicare for all
Can American health insurance survive?
In The Transformation of American Health Insurance, Troyen A. Brennan traces the historical evolution of public and private health insurance in the United States from the first Blue Cross plans in the late 1930s to reforms under the Biden administration. In analyzing this evolution, he finds long-term trends that form the basis for his central argument: that employer-sponsored insurance is becoming unsustainably expensive, and Medicare for All will emerge as the sole source of health insurance over the next two decades.
After thirty years of leadership in health care and academia, Brennan argues that Medicare for All could act as a single-payer program or become a government-regulated program of competing health plans, like today's Medicare Advantage. The choice between these two options will depend on how private insurers adapt and behave in today's changing health policy environment.
This critical evolution in the system of financing health care is important to employers, health insurance executives, government officials, and health care providers who are grappling with difficult strategic choices. It is equally important to all Americans as they face an inscrutable health insurance system and wonder what the future might hold for them regarding affordable coverage.
eBook
The Ugly Laws
The murky history behind municipal laws criminalizing
disability In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries, municipal laws targeting \"unsightly beggars\" sprang up
in cities across America. 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.
eBook
Wounded Warrior Handbook
The typical wounded soldier must complete and file twenty-two forms after an active-duty injury.To soldiers and their families coping with the shock and reality of the injuries, figuring out what to do next--even completing tasks that seem easy like submitting paperwork--can be overwhelming and confusing.The second edition of this popular.
eBook
Words made flesh
During the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf
appeared in the United States for the first time. These schools
were committed to the use of the sign language to educate deaf
students. Manual education made the growth of the deaf community
possible, for it gathered deaf people together in sizable numbers
for the first time in American history. It also fueled the
emergence of Deaf culture, as the schools became agents of cultural
transformations. Just as the Deaf community began to be recognized
as a minority culture, in the 1850s, a powerful movement arose to
undo it, namely oral education. Advocates of oral education, deeply
influenced by the writings of public school pioneer Horace Mann,
argued that deaf students should stop signing and should start
speaking in the hope that the Deaf community would be abandoned,
and its language and culture would vanish. In this revisionist
history, Words Made Flesh explores the educational battles of the
nineteenth century from both hearing and deaf points of view. It
places the growth of the Deaf community at the heart of the story
of deaf education and explains how the unexpected emergence of
Deafness provoked the pedagogical battles that dominated the field
of deaf education in the nineteenth century, and still reverberate
today.
eBook
The Disability Rights Movement
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 book includes a new chapter on the evolving impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the continuing struggle for cross-disability civil and human rights, and the changing perceptions of disability.
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.
Based on interviews with over one hundred activists,The Disability Rights Movementtells a complex and compelling story of an ongoing movement that seeks to create an equitable and diverse society, inclusive of people with disabilities.
eBook