Keene State College (KSC) received a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) project grant in October, 2024. Link to the project announcement.
"Keene State receives grant for teaching disability history in rural communities" - The Keene Sentinel, December 15, 2024
The Struggle for Disability Rights - Overview of Disability History - 2,500-word article from the 2026 National History Day Theme Book.
Events
March 11, 2026 - Disability and Young Voters: Access, Legislation and Mobilizing Young Voters - A National Civic Learning Week Discussion - 7:00-7:55pm Eastern Time
- Info and registration.
- Learn about history of voting by people with disabilities, including barriers to voting, efforts to overcome those barriers and current trends in voting. Gain perspectives on youth voting. Access resources to support developing a program to prepare and support students with disabilities (and all students) to register and vote. Discuss the most important strategies to support the disabled youth vote going forward.
- Discussion with New Voters, Program for Disability Research at Rutgers University and Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University.
April 7, 2026 - Virtual Teaching Disability History Conference - 5:00-7:30pm Eastern Time
- Info and registration.
- K-12 teachers, instructors of pre-service teachers, disability historians, disability studies educators, and disability rights advocates from across the U.S. will meet via zoom to discuss ways to expand and strengthen the teaching of stories of disability history in K-12 schools.
July 9, 2025 - In-person Teaching Disability History Conference - Tom Harkin Institute, Drake University - Des Moines, Iowa - 9:00am to 4:00pm Eastern Time
Watch for registration to open soon.
- K-12 teachers, instructors of pre-service teachers, disability historians, disability studies educators, and disability rights advocates from across the U.S. will for a full day meet to discuss ways to expand and strengthen the teaching of stories of disability history in K-12 schools.
- Project partners will host the annual conference at the Harkin Institute at the University of Texas at Arlington (2027).
Teaching Disability History Interest Group - quarterly, virtual sharing & discussion.
- Teachers, researchers, historians and advocates meet virtually quarterly to share ideas, experiences, resources, and research at many levels and to build a community of practitioners nationwide. The group also discusses efforts to help teachers meet state standards and/or mandates to teach disability history in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other states.
Contact Rich Cairn rcairn @ collaborative.org to join the interest group and for event dates.
Projects
Student Research Guides
Keene, its partners and local teachers created a series of guides for student research on disability history in middle and high school classrooms.
Topics include: disabled veterans; researching local history; centers for independent living; students with intellectual disabilities; asylums; and the disability rights movement. Guides will feature rural people with disabilities in New Hampshire, Iowa and Texas.
The guides aid teachers to support student investigation of local stories of disability, including individuals and institutions in students’ communities.
The guides direct students in how to search and to use primary sources from the collections of the Library of Congress and other national and local archives and libraries. Featured Library of Congress collections include: Historical American Buildings Survey, Sanborn maps, American Folklife Center, StoryCorps, Veterans History Project, and historic newspaper articles from Chronicling America.
Work with Rural Teachers
Keene State College education and history departments will collaborate with the college library and with Emerging America to provide professional development and ongoing support for integrating disability into the curriculum for teachers in rural New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts.
Online Exhibit
Emerging America published the online exhibit: How Civil War Veterans Transformed Disability in 2023. Keene State, Emerging America and their partners will broaden exhibit stories to include veterans from across the U.S., especially from rural communities, and including Black southerners who fought for the Union and whites who fought for the Confederacy.
Inclusive History News
Emerging America will continue to publish its monthly eNews under this new title, featuring news and resources on teaching disability history. Email rcairn@collaborative.org to receive the free eNews.
Project Leadership
Graham Warder
Chair of Keene's History Department, will direct the project. He has been active in disability history, beginning in 2000 as Cataloger and Acquisitions Director of the all-digital Disability History Museum. Warder served as lead historian in the development of the nation’s most comprehensive K-12 disability history curriculum: Reform to Equal Rights.
Rich Cairn
History, Civics and Social Studies Inclusion Specialist for CES, was lead author of the Reform to Equal Rights: K-12 Disability History Curriculum. He founded Emerging America in 2006 and the Accessing Inquiry Clearinghouse in 2016. He serves on the board of the Disability History Museum and of the Disability History Association.
Kate Benson
Former special education teacher and team chair, and a specialist in disability and institutional history, she is the author of a number of volumes on the history of asylums and state schools in Massachusetts as well as the president of the Belchertown State School Friends Association. Her work has been featured in the Boston Globe, on New England Public Radio, and on numerous disability-focused websites. She serves on the Massachusetts Special Commission on State Institutions and is a member of the board of the Massachusetts History Alliance where she co-chairs its annual conference.
Ross Newton
History Teacher at HEC Academy in Northampton, a special education public high school of the Collaborative for Educational Services (CES). He contributes to Emerging America’s Reform to Equal Rights: K-12 Disability Curriculum, and to CES workshops, conference panels, and graduate courses on teaching history to diverse students.
Find more details at the Emerging America Team page.
About the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
Since 2006, Congress has appropriated funds to the TPS program to establish and fund a consortium of organizations working to incorporate “the digital collections of the Library of Congress into educational curricula.” Each year, members of the TPS Consortium support tens of thousands of learners to build knowledge, engagement and critical thinking skills with items from the Library’s collections.
Sponsors
