Telethons: Disabled People to the Rescue

National Museum of American History Tuesday Colloquium featuring Director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability Catherine Kudlick

Tea and cookies at 3:30pm. Talk at 4pm. Free and open to the public. 

Director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability will share about her experiences editing Paul Longmore's magnum opus, Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity from Oxford University Press.

About Telethons: 

• Provides the first cultural history of a fundraising form that became a fixture in American life, marshalling two decades' worth of painstaking research

• Investigates familiar staples of the telethon such as "poster children," the comedic emcee, and the concept of "conspicuous contribution."

• Serves as a chronicle of disability history in the postwar US, charting the changing depiction of the disabled from objects of pity in the Fifties and Sixties to figures of empowerment in the late twentieth century

• Features an afterword from noted Disability Studies scholar, Carol J. Gill

Learn more about the book here.