Disability: A History of Resistance

A ground-breaking history of modern Britain that puts the experiences of disabled people to the fore for the first time. 'A timely and enjoyable untold history' PHILIPPA GREGORY'A rare feat of a book: so many extraordinary stories, so many lost names, brought to light' RAYMOND ANTROBUSDespite there being more than 16 million disabled people in the UK today, disability rarely features in mainstream accounts of our past.That absence is not down to any lack of evidence: it is a forgotten, suppressed history - the result of deliberate choices about whose histories matter.For the first time, this book puts disabled lives at the centre of the story of modern Britain. It tells a story of resistance and ingenuity, and often one of flourishing, full of people who refused to be silenced or pitied.We meet the seventeenth-century labourer, who fights accusations in court that he’s faking his disability - and wins; the eighteenth-century painter who signs her miniatures for royalty ‘without hands’;