About (Un)Hidden

It is impossible to understand history of any kind without understanding the ways in which disabled people have lived our lives, shaped the events around us, and been shaped by them. In turn, there is no way to understand the world we live in without knowing our history. It follows that our understanding of the world we live in is incomplete because we know so little about disabled people in the past.

The extent to which this is true becomes staggering when you go digging for this history, which is what I have done for the last decade while simultaneously fighting to unseal hidden histories that powerful governments and institutions have tried to shield from public view.

In my work I have uncovered the stories of the disabled dead buried anonymously in forgotten burial grounds, written and passed legislation to force government to confront its role in the systematic abuse of disabled people, taught disability history to high schoolers and graduate students, and gained access to hundreds of thousands of previously unseen documents telling the disability history of America and the world.

(Un)Hidden is intended to be a space to share the histories that have come to life in my work and reckon with their meaning in our lives. Necessarily, it will be incomplete, sometimes by accident and sometimes by preference. More than anything, it reflects my personal belief that the most overlooked of disabled people past and present—intellectually, developmentally, and mentally disabled people, many of whom were victims of segregated institutionalization—are particularly deserving of our attention, as are the people who they interacted with, past and present.

Unless otherwise noted, the articles, interviews, and materials presented on this site have been written by me, and in many instances they have been edited by John Loeppky, an acclaimed journalist, longtime colleague, and friend in this work.

-Alex Green

Waltham, Massachusetts