From The Metropole, the official blog of the Urban History Association
To celebrate Urban Disability Month, The Metropole is publishing five articles:
- 10/3/2023 – Overview/bibliography
- 10/10/2023 – Nate Holdren, historicizing disability
- 10/17/2023 – Patricia Chadwick’s DC’s history of disability rights activism
- 10/24/2023 – Lisa, the UK disability rights movement 10/31/2023 – Dan, the role that Swiss para-Olympians play in disability rights and the built environment
Fighting For Rights: An Overview Of Urban Disability
Disability’s definition and impact over the centuries is not static but “often elusive and changing. Not only do people with disabilities have a history…the concept of disability has a history as well,” writes historian Kim E. Nielson.[5] Heumann’s efforts in mid-twentieth-century New York represent several very important data points but not the only ones, and not the first. A review of this history helps to contextualize the struggles Heumann and others like her faced even into the twenty-first century.