Before the Asylum -- Report Made to the Legislature of Massachusetts (1848) / Samuel G. Howe -- A Thesis on Idiocy (1879) / William B. Fish -- The Legacy of the Almshouse / Philip Ferguson -- 'Beside her sat her idiot child': Families and Developmental disability in mid-nineteenth-century America / Penny Richards -- Defining and Categorizing: Establishing "The Other" -- Report of Committee of Classification of Feeble-minded -- Mongols in our Midst: John Langdon Down and the Ethnic Classification of Idiocy, 1858-1924 / David Wright -- 'Mongolian Imbecility': Race and Its Rejection in the Understanding of a Mental Disease / Daniel Kevles -- Rearing the Child Who Never Grew: Ideologies of Parenting and Intellectual Disability in American History / Janice Brockley -- The Parable of The Kallikak Family: Explaining the Meaning of Heredity in 1912 / Leila Zenderland -- Fictional Voices and Viewpoints for the Mentally Deficient, 1929-1939 / Gerald Schmidt -- Sexuality and Story-Telling: Literary Representations of the 'Feeble-Minded' in the Age of Sterilization / Karen Keely -- The Age of Institutionalization and Sterilization -- The Eugenical Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded / Harry Laughlin -- The Criminalization of Mental Retardation / Nicole Rafter -- The State and the Multiply-Disadvantaged: The Case of Epilepsy / Ellen Dwyer
The 'Sociological Advantages' of Sterilization: Fiscal Policies and Feebleminded Women in Interwar Minnesota / Molly Ladd-Taylor -- From Top and Bottom: Parents and the State in the mid-20th Century -- Hope for Retarded Children / Eunice Kennedy Shriver -- 'Mental Deficients' Fighting Fascism: The Unplanned Normalization of World War II / Stephen A. Gelb -- Education for Children with Mental Retardation: Parent Activism, Public Policy, and Family Ideology in the 1950s / Kathleen W. Jones -- 'Nice, Average Americans': Postwar Parents' Groups and the Defense of the Normal Family / Katherine Castles -- Formal Health Care at the Community Level: The Child Development Clinics of the 1950s and 1960s / Wendy M. Nehring -- A Pivotal Place in Special Education Policy: The First Arkansas Children's Colony / Elizabeth F. Shores -- The Promise and Problems of Community Placement Back to a Beginning? -- U.S. Supreme Court decision on Capital Punishment & Mental Retardation (2002) -- Historical Social Geography / Deborah S. Metzel -- The Litigator as Reformer / David J. Rothman and Sheila M. Rothman -- No Profits, Just a Pittance: Work, Compensation, and People Defined as Mentally Disabled in Ontario, 1964-1990 / Geoffrey Reaume -- Family Values / Michael Berube
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The expressions "idiot, you idiot, you're an idiot, don't be an idiot," and the like are generally interpreted as momentary insults. But, they are also expressions that represent an old, if unstable, history. Beginning with an examination of the early nineteenth century labeling of mental retardation as "idiocy," to what we call developmental, intellectual, or learning disabilities, Mental Retardation in America chronicles the history of mental retardation, its treatment and labeling, and its representations and ramifications within the changing economic, social, and political context of America