This website is under development. 

Disability history and culture have been documented, collected, and preserved in many forms and many places: archives at universities and disability organizations, museum collections, libraries, community-held materials, oral history projects, and personal collections that have never been formally catalogued. This history belongs to the disability community, and access to it matters.

The challenge is that these collections are scattered. Many are underfunded and understaffed. Some are at risk. Others are simply hard to find, even for researchers and community members who are actively looking. There is no single place to go to understand what exists, where it is, and how to access it.

Why this matters

Knowing where disability history lives is a prerequisite for preserving it, studying it, teaching it, and building on it. When collections are invisible, they are vulnerable. When community members cannot find their own history, something is lost that cannot always be recovered.

DHACC's role

DHACC is working to build connections across this landscape: between institutions and community members, between researchers and archives, between people doing this work independently and organizations with resources to support it. We are gathering information about collections and archives that hold disability history and culture materials, with the goal of making that information more accessible over time.

This work is in active development. If you know of a collection, archive, museum, or community-held resource that should be part of this network, we want to hear from you.

Contact us at DHACC@ILoveYou-LeadOn.com.

Resources and organizations

Disability history and culture are being preserved and shared by organizations and museums across the country. The groups below are doing that work, and DHACC has a relationship with each of them. This list is growing and is incomplete. If you know of an organization that should be here, contact us at DHACC@ILoveYou-LeadOn.com.

National Museum of Disability History and Culture (NMDHC) 

The NMDHC is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing the history and culture of people with disabilities. 

Learn more about the National Museum of Disability History and Culture

Viscardi Museum of Disability History

The Museum of Disability History at The Viscardi Center is a non-profit cultureal institution in Long Island, New York. Its collection is made up of over 8,000 artifacts, documents, books and photographic images that chronicle the story of the disability rights movement from its origin through modern-day. 

Learn more about the Viscardi Museum of Disability History

The Dot Experience

The Dot Experience, in Louisville, Kentucky, is a new immersive exhibition space of American Printing House for the Blind (APH). Designed to be the most inclusive museum in the world, they imagine a future without barriers, where every person is able to reach their fullest potential.

Centered on the daily realities, contributions, and impact of real people, The Dot Experience invites visitors to recognize a simple, yet complex, truth: everyone encounters the world differently.

Learn more about The Dot Experience

The Disability Social History Project

The Disability Social History Project is a community history project documenting disability history, culture, art, and media, with an open invitation for public contributions of disabled heroes, events, and resources. It's an opportunity for disabled people to reclaim their history and determine how they want to define themselves and their struggles. 

Learn more about the Disability Social History Project

Pennhurst Memorial Preservation Alliance

The Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance promotes an understanding of the struggle for dignity and full civil rights for persons with disabilities, using the little-known history at Pennhurst. By sharing this tragic story as well as its landmark victories, they seek to educate citizens in local, national, and international communities to ensure that we never go back. The vision of Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance is to be part of an effort to create a world-class museum to honor and memorialize the ongoing civil and human rights struggle of Americans with disabilities at a location of national significance, to assure that we never go back.

Learn more about Pennhurst Memorial Preservation Alliance