The Americans with Disabilities Act is considered the most important civil rights law since the 1960s. Through first-person stories, we look back at the making of this movement, the history of how disability came to be seen as a civil rights issue in the first place, and what the disability community is still fighting for more than 30 years later.
Nov 2020
Disability History special
We look back at the fight for disability rights in the UK and India in the 1990s, plus the remarkable life of Helen Keller as told by her great niece, how a Rwandan Paralympic volleyball team made history, and the invention of the iconic disability vehicle, the Invacar. And we sp ... Show More
50m 24s
Dec 2019
Sarah Handley-Cousins, "Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
All wars, in a practical sense, center on the destruction of the human body, and in Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Handley-Cousins, a clinical assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, shows how disability was ... Show More
48m 20s
Aug 2021
The Sunday Read: ‘The Man Who Filed More Than 180 Disability Lawsuits’
For much of America’s history, a person with a disability had few civil rights related to their disability. That began to change when, in the 1980s, a group of lawmakers started to agitate for sweeping civil rights legislation.The result of their efforts was the Americans With Di ... Show More
46m 25s
Oct 2018
Civil Rights - New World A’Comin | 1
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing the slaves in much of the South. But the road to freedom—true freedom—would take generations longer for most black Americans.In this new six-part series, we investigate their struggle, begi ... Show More
38m 5s
May 2023
Reconstruction: Why We Didn't Learn About It
The Reconstruction Era, a period in American history at the end of and immediately following the Civil War, is one of the single-most important and instructive periods in American history. It has also, historically, been one of the least taught. Why is that, and what are we missi ... Show More
38m 40s