Library Guides: Disability Studies: Primary Sources

Best Bets

Disability in the Modern World: History of a Social Movement This link opens in a new window
Online collection of newspapers, videos, texts and images that document the rise of a social movement around Disability. Includes material in many formats and from a wide range of disciplines.

A vast collections of resources from a variety of institutions, including many from UC Berkeley, are searchable through the Online Archive of California. Some are online, such as photographs from the Disabled Students Program Photographic Collections, 1970's-1992. Others, like the Disability Rights Leadership Archive Video Collections and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund Records, 1970-2000 can be located online, but need to be used onsite.
The Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement is a rich collection of primary sources exploring the social and political history of the disability movement from the 1960's to the present, including oral histories and archival papers.
Collections such as the Southern California Rainbow Society of the Deaf Record show the importance of intersectionality -- also note that "disability" does not retrieve this collection, search instead for Deaf.
Calisphere is a gateway to digital collections across the ten UC campuses and a number of educational and cultural heritage institutions across California.