The Right to Live in This World

A landmark history of disability rights in America—and the two-century struggle to claim a place in the nation disabled Americans helped build—from renowned disability rights advocate and scholar Ari Ne’eman.

For generations, disabled Americans were segregated, institutionalized, sterilized, excluded from schools and workplaces, and denied the most basic freedoms of citizenship. Yet amidst this injustice, they succeeded in building a uniquely transformative and little understood civil rights movement with a central role in American history. In The Right to Live in This World, leading scholar and disability rights advocate Ari Ne’eman delivers a groundbreaking sweeping narrative history of disability in America. Spanning two centuries, from the religious fervor of the early American republic through the horrors of eugenics to the decades of advocacy and organizing that built the modern system of disability civil rights law and public services, Ne’eman reveals how disabled Americans reshaped the nation's laws, politics, and understanding of freedom itself—and how these victories are increasingly under threat today. Situating disability at the heart of the American story, Ne’eman traces the many roots of the modern disability rights movement and how they are intertwined with the histories of religion, labor, civil rights, medicine, education, and democracy. The result is a history that overturns conventional understandings of the American past while restoring disabled people to their rightful place within it. Ambitious, revelatory, and deeply human, The Right to Live in This World is a magisterial work of history that recasts the struggle for disability rights as one of the defining stories of the American experiment.