: Disability History Museum: Library

DHM Library

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Library Orientation

Disability, like race and gender, is a central part of the human experience. Our goal is to create a theme-based, searchable collection of primary source materials that will help expand knowledge and understanding about the historical experience of people with disabilities in the United States.

The Disability History Museum's Library is a digital archive that only exists online. It contains digital versions of images, texts, and other artifacts related to disability history that have been gathered from libraries and private collections across the country.

Walkers
Materials in the Library date back to the 18th century and represent all disability categories across the life span. These records illuminate daily life, work, charity, popular culture, local and national political milestones, shifts in visual representation and medical knowledge, and the rise and fall of a variety of social movements. We will soon be adding to our collections at a rate of about 100 artifacts monthly.

The Library is currently divided into two collections. The Document Collection contains articles, pamphlets, letters, book excerpts, and other texts. The Visual Still Collection contains photographs, paintings, postcards, lithographs, and other visual materials. An Audio Collection will be added in the future.

Two Sisters
Our acquisition strategy does not aim to be comprehensive: We will not seek all records related to our topic. Our goal is to develop a robust study collection. We choose materials because they represent a genre of records, or because they are unique. Many of the items we include are currently inaccessible to the public due to their geographic location, rarity, physical condition or simply because people do not know that they exist and are relevant to disability history.

Artifacts in the Library can be accessed by using the links to the Browse tools or by performing Basic or Advanced searches.

A note on language:

The language used to describe various "disabilities" has changed often in the past 300 years. It has been at times offensive, derogatory, and even mystifying. In order to preserve and explore the historical record, the Library Keyword List uses these historical terms as appropriate. More information about the use of historical terms can be found in the Library FAQ.

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