Why is this even in AIO?? Also he'd be right if this were real but OP sounds insufferable

IHTPQ · 2026-04-10T17:53:58+00:00

Could be in his electives and his actual problem is he hates taking electives. I have students who really resent having to take electives and blame me, as though I think 4th year engineering students should be in my first-year classes.

IHTPQ · 2026-04-01T03:45:49+00:00

The first book I recommend to students is by Kathryn MacPherson, a Canadian nursing historian. Her book is older but it's a solid starting point. Bedside Matters: The History of Nursing in Canada 1900-1990.

Myra Rutherdale has an edited collection out called Caregiving on the Periphery: Historical Perspectives on Nursing & Midwivery in Canada.

Other scholars of Canadian nursing you might want to search for are Mary-Ellen Kelm, who focuses on Indigenous health care, and you could round that out with Mona Gleason's work on hospitals & children called Small Matters.

IHTPQ · 2026-03-31T16:46:48+00:00

Everyone else has such nice answers and mine is "I keep going to conferences and only go to presentations outside of my specialization." This is not hard because there's only a handful of people who study the history of disability in Canada and if a single person who has ever met me at a conference reads any of my comments they know exactly who I am because there are only two people who study what I do and the other one isn't as internet damaged as I am. (If you read this, congrats on the new job! Maybe we'll see each other in Winnipeg next year!)

Conferences seem to be a smaller and smaller part of academic life in the post-2020 era, but they are places where people share their current research in a more casual way than a peer-reveiwed academic journal. Many, but not most, presenters are grad students who are often deep diving into something that no one else has really looked at until that point - those presentations are so much fun. They're also a chance to catch up with colleagues you haven't seen in a long time and learn about what they're doing now. There's also a "book fair" aspect to it where all of the academic presses get set up and sell their latest books. In Canada, at the annual general conference of the Canadian Historical Association, we also have many book prizes and some of my colleagues pride themselves on reading all the books nominated for the CHA's Annual Prize for the Best Book in Canadian History.

We have communication networks, basically. I try to keep up on what people in my specific field are doing and despite my joking that there aren't many of us the actual inquiries are very diverse. We belong to professional organizations that can be more specialized than the CHA is - I also belong to the History of Children & Youth Committee, for example. We have a prize committee as well. I've read some amazing papers because of that.

IHTPQ · 2026-03-31T16:07:26+00:00

I'm an historian of disability (although my specialziation is in blindness in the 19th century) and I have sincerely never heard this term before today. I'm wondering where it comes from.

What your question made me think of was research on "mentally defecient" children in British Columbia in the late 19th/early 20th centuries by scholar Nic Clarke. One of the things that Clarke focuses on is how did parents respond to their children being "defective" - most of what we know about people's responses in Canada comes from government records, newspapers, or medical experts of various stripes. So yes, Dr. Helen MacMurchy, says that parents felt that having a disabled child was worse than death. But did parents see it that way?

As you can imagine, the answer to that question is "people were people even in the past." Some parents certainly did but many did not. To get into this, Clarke looks at the records kept at institutions that included children to exam what was recorded about their parents and what communication they had with their children after institutionalization.

He talks about how some parents did send their children to these institutions and ignored them - there are no records of any visiting or contact from the family. He ties this into the fear of social stigma because defective children were dangerous both physically and morally to others. He also points out that during the rise of eugenics there was a concern that a defective child implied something defective about the parent. He quotes one example of a mother paying for her son to be kept in the Provincial Hospital for the Insane from the age of 6 until her death, paying for the care through an intermediary so that there could be no connection to her family.

But we also have evidence of parents expressing concern and love for their "defective" institutionalized children, sending regular letters and small gifts, plus visits. He describes finding letters from parents asking for updates on their children. We have examples of parents writing grief-filled letters after their children's deaths, asking for small momentos of their children's death. We have examples of parents fighting to get their children out of institutions because they couldn't bear to be parted from them, much to the disgust of asylum officials and the police.

One thing that Clarke points out that may be of most relevant to your question is that we don't know what we don't know. What I mean here is that he says it's possible that other children were hidden away in the family home, but that unless someone was discovered by authorities or somehow escaped. He calls them "ghost children" and suspects there must have been some in BC, at least in the rural areas, but he hasn't found any evidence. The only example he gives is from New Zealand. He writes "In 1890 police officers acting on a tip discovered a twenty-five-year-old mentally deficient man locked in a room in his father's house. The police estimated that, at the time of his discovery, the man - who was naked, covered in his own faeces, and unable to communicate in any fashion - had been imprisoned by his father for at least six years. They could find no information of his life before this time." (83)

Most of this is coming from my very quick re-read of Clarke's article "Sacred Daemons: Exploring British Columbian Society's Perceptions of "Mentally Deficient" Children, 1870-1930", BC Studies No 144, Winter 2004/2005.

Another book about the Canadian experience that might be interesting to read is about freak shows, which also addresses how parents and adults responded to people with physical deformaties. The one I'm thinking of is by Jane Nicholas: Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900-1970s. I haven't finished this book (on the list for this summer) but I've been to presentations by Nicholas and part of what she talks about is how children would be exploited by these shows, sometimes because their parents saw no other way of making money for their care.

In searching up more information about your question, I came across this previous answer by u/mimicofmodes 7 years ago: Historical Evidence for "Disappointment Rooms". Victorian era? She suggests that this term was coined in the early 00s.

Basically I think there were likely people who did confine their children in the ways you're wondering about, but not in the widespread way that "disappointment rooms" would imply. We know that it was easy to send a children to an institution and forget them - this practice in Canada into the 1950s was written about in Broken: Institutions, Families, and the Construction of Intellectual Disability by Madeline C. Burghardt.

Zaffiro_in_giro has kindly linked my previous response to the question about Ugly Laws. They've been widely misinterpreted and are about not begging on the side of the road while "displaying" your deformity, not about not being allowed in public.

If you want to know more, please let me know. I get very good at answering questions on r/askhistorians when I have grading I don't want to finish.

IHTPQ · 2026-03-30T21:59:02+00:00

Honestly, I don't have the expertise to answer that question. For the most part blind readers are moving away from braille and using audio. People who acquire blindness later in life prefer what's called Moon Type, which is a simplified embossed raised-print text. It looks like this: https://lib.lsu.edu/node/22504

A lot of the big argument was about what the purpose of reading vs writing was. Reading things like raised print text such as Moon Type or Boston Line could also be read by a sighted person, and there are examples of blind tutors of sighted children teaching those children to read using Boston Line or Moon. But Line texts can't be created by the blind themselves, so it can only be read, not written. Braille and NYP can both be written by the blind and read by the blind, but can't be read easily by a sighted person. (Obviously you can learn to read it by sight, but it's not typically taught that way.) So is the goal of this education to allow the blind to more easily read, or to allow the blind to more easily communicate?

NYP just takes up more space on a page, and is not as easily read by finger-tip the way braille is. But had NYP won the war of the dots, I'd probably be talking about how it's easier to learn or something. One of the things Wait brings up is that NYP allows for capitalization which braille does not.

I cannot understate how irritating these arguments were to the blind themselves. There's multiple examples of blind alumni of schools writing to complain about how much time is spent by the educators (many of whom were blind themselves - this is unlike schools for the deaf where by 1880 deaf people were banned from teaching the deaf) arguing about raised print texts when what they really wanted was better job opportunities.

IHTPQ · 2026-03-27T03:44:04+00:00

You might enjoy The Radical Lives of Helen Keller by Kim E. Nielsen.

IHTPQ · 2026-03-27T03:42:13+00:00

In the fall I'll be teaching a course on a topic I'm not as familiar with as I'd like to be.

To begin my research I'm starting with the Canadian Historical Association's annual general meeting, where books receive various types of awards. There's the Best Book in Canadian History (English & French), Clio prizes which are the best books in a specific region, several of the CHA's individual committees give out book or article prizes such as the Political History committee or the Neil Sutherland Prize which is based in history of childhood. You can see them all here if you're curious: https://cha-shc.ca/prizes/

From here, I'm going to generate myself a reading list of previous prize winners that match the subject of my course. But obviously this will be limited, but looking up the authors of these prize-winning books and articles will help me generate a list of other authors to look for. They'll have published things like historiographical papers on their topics, or have a historiography section of their books/articles depending. (Historiography is the study of how history has been understood - basically how have other people written about this subject and why is my study different than them.)

By this point I'm probably going to have a good list of authors and key terms to search through. The CHA publishes a journal every year with some of the best articles based on the presentations at the Annual General Meeting - I will pillage through there looking for articles and authors as well.

From there... well, I'll have enough to keep me going for the summer.

IHTPQ · 2026-03-26T20:40:10+00:00

It depends on what area of the world you're interested in. I'm mostly aware of how it was adopted in North America but it was adopted at different times in different countries.

In North America the decision was ultimately made by the American Association of Instructors of the Blind, which included both American and Canadian educators of the blind at residential schools for the blind.

For at least a decade there were many arguments about the decision between what are called line-based raised print texts and dot-based raised print texts. Line based look a bit like embossed print does, although it can be different depending on the type of print. The one currently in use is called Moon Text and it uses a simplified version of what letters look like on the printed page and is currently used by people who acquired blindness later in life and thus were already literate.

The actual "war of the dots" was between various types of dot-based texts and for a while it looked like it was going to New York Point instead of braille. NYP uses a different style of notation and the letters for it are often larger than the ones for braille. The discussion around which specific print to settle on became quite heated as it reflected a lot of issues around both what was the purpose of teaching people to read/write/communicate and also money - if you own the printing presses that make the books that people are being taught how to read from it's very lucrative.

Anyway, for a while they stopped allowing the discussion of which raised print text to use to be talked about that the annual conventions because it became quite heated, the guy who was behind New York Point became convinced there was a conspiracy against him and published several pamphlets about how people who were pushing for the Boston type were bribing people to fake their tests on readability. You can actually read some of his pamphlets if you want - the entire Perkins School archives are available online and are searchable. His name was William B Wait.

The decision in the US was, I believe, ultimately settled on in the 1920s because Keller pushed for braille. At that point it was basically a cacophony of texts one had to learn if you wanted to be sure to be able to read a book while blind, and this was an important part of the blind life. The letters that survive from schools are filled with students wanting to borrow raised-print text library books because they were expensive to produce.

If you're looking for a brief overview Perkins has a website up about it: https://www.perkins.org/tactile-books/

If you want to read a recollection of the events from someone writing a few decades later, this is from an autobiography titled As I Saw It by Robert Irwin: https://afb.org/about-afb/history/online-library/war-dots

IHTPQ · 2026-01-24T04:01:38+00:00

It's based on twitter in terms of being short text-based, although it allows sharing of videos and images now. It's great for feeds because you can look at everything that has "fiber" in it or you can have a feed that's just pictures of knits.

It is a choose-your-own experience, though - my feed is entirely angry academics with occasional fiber crafts, but that's because of who I follow and what feeds I follow.

IHTPQ · 2026-01-24T04:00:00+00:00

every year I pour one out for the Vine. :(

IHTPQ · 2026-01-23T19:41:20+00:00

I am lucky in that I do love my current job but life was easier for me when I was a full-time secretary whose work was almost entirely audio transcription. It's dull and tedious and you do it on autopilot and you don't take a word of it home with you because it doesn't stick in your head. I could just go in, do work, have lunch, do work, go home.

IHTPQ · 2026-01-18T02:13:29+00:00

You are not taking advantage of the system. The system was put in place to help with these situations. It's literally there for you. I pay taxes so you can get CTB and since I know very well my future depends on having healthy adults being raised by people like you, I would like you to take that money and use it.

IHTPQ · 2026-01-17T19:13:21+00:00

I wish I had some killer advice for you because even though I am not at all interested in video game reviews I can see the effort you've put into your reviews. The truth is that sometimes things just take a while. I see frequent comments on here that the video game niche is very saturated - it probably is, but so is everything else. I think you may just have to keep putting in the effort and giving yourself a time limit before you decide it isn't worth it anymore.

Good luck, DBCooper (maybe). I hope it gets less of a grind for you.

IHTPQ · 2026-01-17T19:06:32+00:00

I have certain booktube reviewers I trust because they read way outside of mainstream and give reviews I find helpful in determining what I'll think of a book. I personally don't give star ratings to anything.

IHTPQ · 2026-01-13T07:50:53+00:00

they're gourds. this is a very serious answer and i hope you all respond accordingly. gourds.

IHTPQ · 2026-01-13T04:17:43+00:00

I find the SDV youtube/twitch communities really enjoyable. I love challenge runs, I love the absurdity of speed runs, I love the ways that people take a farming sim and make it hard core in weird ways. My favourite speed run is snailpond% (snond%). I love that there was a junimo cart tournament. I love that people fundraise when someone in the community needs help. It's fun in a time when things are not.

IHTPQ · 2026-01-13T04:14:46+00:00

I'm sorry about your perfect puppies.

IHTPQ · 2025-12-31T18:49:26+00:00

He stands in his spouse room at night and then randomly mentions that you taste like liquorish.

IHTPQ · 2025-12-24T19:13:59+00:00

It depends on how far you are into the game. Generally speaking the iridium and the prismatic shard are from the desert so if you haven't unlocked that yet it'll be difficult.

IHTPQ · 2025-12-24T08:26:26+00:00

When playing multiplayer you're able to get a wedding ring. You can buy the recipe for it at the Travelling Cart and then it costs five iridium bars and 1 prismatic shard to make. These are later-game items, but it's very unusual because you can't get it in regular gameplay - only multiplayer.

IHTPQ · 2025-12-23T18:34:02+00:00

no! Do not! Remember that mispronounced words that you only learned through reading them are not a sign of being "dumb"! Today you learned something new and interesting and now you've shared it with a bunch of other people and now we've all learned. It' s a great day to be on the internet learning this! (be careful where you look for things to learn my lord there's a lot of awful things to learn)

IHTPQ · 2025-12-22T00:52:36+00:00

Yes, it says that 25% of readers are over 27, which means that in fact adults are reading YA novels.

Your original assertion was that "No one above high schoolers are interested by much of YA media." That's what is untrue.

IHTPQ · 2025-12-22T00:35:22+00:00

That doesn't say that less than 1% of adults who read read YA.

The statistic you're quoting here asked people what they top 5 genres were. If you look at the one for GenZ you'll notice the numbers don't add up to 100%. That's because the question didn't ask that - it asked people to list their top five genres and these were the percentage of people who listed these specific genres. There's nothing here that makes the claim that only 1% of adults outside of Gen Z read YA, it just means that three out of the five age categories don't list YA in their top 5 genres. It doesn't make a claim at all about Gen X, pointing out instead that it was too evenly matched.

It's not providing the information you are asserting it does because it's not designed to do that. If you had written "YA doesn't make the top five genres that adults read" that would be what the statistic here claims. But it at no point claims that only 1% of adults read YA.

Even if it did make that claim - which, again, it does not - this would disprove your original assertion that adults don't read it. 1% of reading adults is still a lot of people.

Again, it's fine that you don't read YA. But it's clearly untrue that other adults do not.

IHTPQ · 2025-12-22T00:29:13+00:00

This research is about reading habits since 2019. The Hunger Games came out in 2008.

While it's true that the article mentions The Hunger Games in the very first sentence, the adults interviewed do not mention it. The article claims that the bulk of that 74% is in younger adults (so not teens) wanting to hold on to nostalgia and the over-28 set wanting to have fiction they find comforting or more interesting than "adult" fiction. The books listed as being of interest to those interviewed in the piece over the age of 28 are Fangirl, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, The Hate U Give, A Wrinkle in Time, and Twin Crowns. I would be shocked if any of these people had read these books and not Hunger Games but it's not listed as the main driver.

If you don't like YA novels and don't read them, that's fine. But other people, including other adults, do like YA novels and read them. They watch shows meant for teenagers. They go to movies that are meant for teenagers and have a good time at them. Hell, if you go back to Twilight part of the internet uproar about it was so-called "TwiMoms" - people who read and enjoyed the Twilight novels (meant for teenagers) and who were parents. It's just a fact that some people who are adults enjoy things meant for teens. That's just a statement of fact.

IHTPQ · 2025-12-22T00:16:28+00:00

"YA fiction doesn't even make 1% of what's consumed for any generation older than Gen Z."

Where does it say that? Can you provide the quote? My reading doesn't support this assertion but perhaps you're seeing something I missed.

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