Library digitization has made more than 100,000 nineteenth-century English-language books available to the public. Do the books that have been digitized reflect the population of published books? An affirmative answer would allow book and literary historians to use holdings of major digital libraries as proxies for the population of published…

Examines how the physically disabled have been depicted in American literature over the years, from the nineteenth century association of disability with moral culpability, to the post-Civil War image of the cripple as victim, to the more recent portrayal of the cripple as survivor and hero. (MJL)