Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about
the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Consider two wheelchairs in Washington, DC-one well-known, and one
forgotten. The former belonged to FDR and is now memorialized in bronze
with a statue of its user forever attached to the seat. The other sits
in the climate-controlled basement of the Smithsonian. Its owner was Ed
Roberts, the deceased father of the Disability Culture Movement, and it
was dropped off at the museum with a note that argued that the chair has
an important story to tell. Christopher R. Smit understands that all
wheelchairs have stories to tell, narratives described in this book as
integral to our understanding of how technology and human beings are
forged together into meaningful markers of progress and power.
While the wheelchair can so easily evoke positive concepts like
mobility, nimbleness, transport, and volition, it is also often attached
to darker notions of neediness, isolation, sickness and inertness.
Wheelchair demythologizes a revolutionary machine and revises its
place in the history of objects.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The
Atlantic.
