AURIE
BLOCK found a gaping hole in American history that she's using the
Internet to fill. She and a diverse team are building the Disability
History Museum here in Massachusetts, but its home will be on the Web.
Block has been asked if a history of people with disabilities is too
rarefied. But the museum - and its virtual library and education program -
taps hot issues.
Celebrity mattered. Charles Stratton, better known as
Tom Thumb, was
shown off to the world by
P.T. Barnum and was as famous in his time as
Marilyn Monroe was in hers.
Stereotypes were blinding. Too often those with disabilities were
broad-brushed as extremely noble or severely limited.
Struggles raged over education, access to jobs, and even states'
rights.
In the 1850s,
advocate Dorothea Dix
wanted the sale of government lands
to finance asylums for ''indigent insane persons.'' President
Franklin
Pierce vetoed a congressional bill to do this. He wrote that he had ''to
resist the deep sympathies of my own heart in favor of the humane purpose
sought...'' because it would be unconstitutional for the federal
government to force this job on the states.
The museum will tell these stories. The library has documents like
Pierce's veto
and the 1851 memoir of Isaac Hunt,
a patient who disagreed with Dix. Visitors will see that American history has underexplored
territory. But the key lesson may well be that America's story is an
ongoing civil war over values.
This is the Internet at its best. Block used some of this research
for a 1998
National Public Radio series. The Web, however, is more dynamic.
The museum won't run out of room. The library collects documents from
all over, including the
American School for the Deaf, the Boeing Company Archives, and
the Yale Medical Library.
The education program will have curriculums for grades 5-12. And
visitors in Amherst or Australia will have the same easy point-and-
click access.
The library at www.disabilitymuseum.org is now open. The museum and
education program are still being developed. The project should be fully
launched in 2003.
As promising as this museum is, it's haunted by a cold fact of creative
life. Money is tight. The museum has a patched quilt of state, federal,
and foundation support. Still, it needs to increase its annual operating
budget to $425,000 and it eventually ought to have an endowment of at
least $2 million.
Which gets back to the war over values.
''It's short-sighted not to invest in knowing how our culture works,''
Block says.
But government funding for cultural projects is scarce - even when
there's no whiff of controversy.
Like a railroad, the Internet could cut new routes into the heart of
the country - if we invest in building it.
Founders
meant 'the militia'
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