Polio, an infectious disease caused by a virus, became epidemic in the United States in the early to mid-20th century. Recounted in the form of a journal, this story about Edna Black Hindson does a wonderful job making the story of polio come alive. Edna caught polio in 1946, before the height of the epidemic, and the introduction of the vaccine - and well after Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned Warm Springs into the only place focused only on treating poliomyelitis. Thus, her story shows how Americans in the 1940s understood and treated polio, how they were able to use the facilities at Warm Springs and the work it took to help children recover muscle control and the ability to move their limbs that had been originally paralyzed.

Polio, an infectious disease caused by a virus, became epidemic in the United States in the early to mid-20th century. Recounted in the form of a journal, this story about Edna Black Hindson does a wonderful job making the story of polio come alive. Edna caught polio in 1946, before the height of the epidemic, and the introduction of the vaccine --and well after Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned Warm Springs into the only place focused only on treating poliomyelitis. Thus, her story shows how Americans in the 1940s understood and treated polio, how they were able to use the facilities at Warm Springs and the work it took to help children recover muscle control and the ability to move their limbs that had originally been paralyzed.

For almost two centuries North America has been a major destination for international migrants, but from the late nineteenth century onward, governments began to regulate borders, set immigration quotas, and define categories of citizenship. To develop a more dimensional approach to migration studies, the contributors to this volume focus on people born in the United States and Canada who migrated to the other country, as well as Japanese, Chinese, German, and Mexican migrants who came to the United States and Canada. These case studies explore how people and ideas transcend geopolitical boundaries. By including local, national, and transnational perspectives, the editors emphasize the value of tracking connections over large spaces and political boundaries. Entangling Migration History ultimately contends that crucial issues in the United States and Canada, such as labor and economic growth and ideas about the racial or religious makeup of the nation, are shaped by the two countries’ connections to each other and the surrounding world.

In this book, Shell, himself a victim of polio, offers an inspired analysis of the disease. Part memoir, part cultural criticism and history, part meditation on the meaning of disease, Shell's work combines the understanding of a medical researcher with the sensitivity of a literary critic. He deftly draws a detailed yet broad picture of the lived experience of a crippling disease as it makes it way into every facet of human existence.

The year 2009 will mark the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. From 1840 to his death in 1882, Darwin was constantly plagued by chronic illnesses that allowed him to work only a few hours at a time and by an obsession with his physical health. Was this the psychosomatic product of stress resulting from the development and public reception to his theory of evolution or the result of a disease or parasite obtained during the world traveler's excursions? In 1977 Ralph Colp Jr. argued persuasively for the former explanation in his book To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin, now out of print, but considered to be one of the century's most important works on Darwin's life. Expanding and reworking his earlier arguments to take into account new information (including Darwin's "Diary of Health," included as an appendix), Darwin's Illness paints a more intimate portrait of the nature and possible causes of Darwin's lifelong illness, of the ways he and Victorian physicians tried treating it, and how it influenced his scientific work and relations with his family and friends.

"Chronicles in seamless prose her own journeys as a person with a disability. She ends her memoir triumphantly, claiming proudly her identity as a feminist writer with a disability."--Library Journal

This study of the cultural and military importance of British forts in the colonial era explains how these forts served as communities in Indian country more than as bastions of British imperial power. Their security depended on maintaining good relations with the local Native Americans, who incorporated the forts into their economic and social life as well as into their strategies.