Window Shopping with Helen Keller

David Serlin is professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

• IntroductionChapter One: The Church of the Elephant ManChapter Two: Helen Keller and the Urban ArchiveChapter Three: Disabling the WPAChapter Four: Overdue at the LibraryEpilogue: 1968AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

"[Serlin] casts intriguing new light on the Works Progress Administrationʼs relationships with disability. As the New Deal institution responsible for so much of the modern built environment, other scholars have pegged the WPA as deeply under the sway of eugenics, incorporating little accommodation for the elderly, infirm, or disabled, but Serlin surfaces evidence that in fact it contained fairly advanced thinking on disability. . . and that it was Cold War–era design that actually swept away disability-accommodating features."