Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader Book

	Introduction	1
Pt. I	Before the Asylum
	A Selection from Report Made to the Legislature of Massachusetts (1848)	23
	A Thesis on Idiocy	27
1	The Legacy of the Almshouse	40
2	"Beside Her Sat Her Idiot Child": Families and Developmental Disability in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America	65
Pt. II	Defining and Categorizing: Establishing "The Other"
	Report of Committee on Classification of Feeble-Minded	87
	The New Classification (Tentative) of the Feeble-Minded: Editorial	89
3	Mongols in Our Midst: John Langdon Down and the Ethnic Classification of Idiocy, 1858-1924	92
4	"Mongolian Imbecility": Race and Its Rejection in the Understanding of a Mental Disease	120
5	Rearing the Child Who Never Grew: Ideologies of Parenting and Intellectual Disability in American History	130
6	The Parable of The Kallikak Family: Explaining the Meaning of Heredity in 1912	165
7	Fictional Voices and Viewpoints for the Mentally Deficient, 1929-1939	186
8	Sexuality and Storytelling: Literary Representations of the "Feebleminded" in the Age of Sterilization	207
Pt. III	The Age of Institutionalization and Sterilization
	The Eugenical Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded	225
9	The Criminalization of Mental Retardation	232
10	The State and the Multiply Disadvantaged: The Case of Epilesy	258
11	The "Sociological Advantages" of Sterilization: Fiscal Policies and Feeble-Minded Women in Interwar Minnesota	281
Pt. IV	From Top and Bottom: Parents and the State in the Mid-Twentieth Century
	Hope for Retarded Children	303
12	"Mental Deficients" Fighting Fascism: The Unplanned Normalization of World War II	308
13	Education for Children with Mental Retardation: Parent Activism, Public Policy, and Family Ideology in the 1950s	322
14	"Nice, Average Americans": Postwar Parents' Groups and the Defense of the Normal Family	351
15	Formal Health Care at the Community Level: The Child Development Clinics of the 1950s and 1960s	371
16	A Pivotal Place in Special Education Policy: The First Arkansas Children's Colony	384
Pt. V	The Promise and Problems of Community Placement: Back to a Beginning?
	U.S. Supreme Court Decision on Capital Punishment and Mental Retardation (2002)	413
17	Historical Social Geography	420
18	The Litigator as Reformer	445
19	No Profits, Just a Pittance: Work, Compensation, and People Defined as Mentally Disabled in Ontario, 1964-1990	466
20	Family Values	494
	About the Contributors	501
	Index	505