The Disability History Museum is a digital museum that strives to "foster a deeper understanding about how changing cultural values, notions of identity, laws and policies have shaped and influenced the experience of people with disabilities, their families and their communities over time." A project of the educational media organization Straight Ahead Pictures, the Disability History Museum contains an extensive collection of materials relating to disability throughout nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century U.S. history. These materials, which are drawn from a number of contributing museums and libraries, can be browsed through the Library tab. Here, visitors can browse the collection Topic List (e.g. Civil Liberties & Rights, Women & Gender, Diagnoses & Diseases) or Keyword List (e.g. American Braille Press, Medicare, War of 1812) and filter their results by document type or date. This collection features numerous photographs, articles, speeches, reports, and more that illustrate both the experiences of individuals with disabilities throughout history as well as changing social and political conceptions of disability. In the Education section, instructors will find resources to incorporate disability history into their classrooms, including seven complete lesson plans. (At the time of this write-up, the Exhibition tab is "in development;" however, the rest of this website is fully-functioning.)
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