Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Editors' Note
Introduction
Chapter 1. Charity Professionals: Ambivalent Generosity and the New Business of Philanthropy
Chapter 2. Neither Public Nor Private: Telethons in the U.S. Health and Welfare System
Chapter 3. The Hidden Politics of Telethons: Where Volunteerism, Government, and Business Meet
Chapter 4. "They've Got a Good Thing with Us and We've Got a Good Thing with Them":
Telethons and Cause-Related Marketing
Chapter 5. Givers and Takers: Conspicuous Contribution and a Distinctly American Moral Community
Chapter 6. Dignity Thieves: Greed, Generosity, and Objects of Charity
Chapter 7. Suffering as Spectacle: Pity, Pathos, and Ideology
Chapter 8 "Look at Us We're Walking": Cure-Seekers, Invalids and Overcomers
Chapter 9 American and Un-American Bodies: Searching for Fitness through Technology and Sport
Chapter 10. Smashing Icons: Gender, Sexuality, and Disability
Chapter 11. "Heaven's Special Child": The Making of Poster Children
Chapter 12. Family Burdens: Parents, Children, and Disability
Chapter 13. Jerry's Kids Grow Up: Disability Rights Activists and Telethons
Conclusion: The End of Telethons and Challenges for Disability Rights
Afterword
Notes

About the Author

Paul K. Longmore was a respected disability rights activist and Professor of History at San Francisco State University until his unexpected death in 2010. His previous books include The Invention of George Washington and Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Longmore lived with significant mobility impairments as a result of childhood polio. He worked on Telethons for over two decades and believed it to be
his crowning achievement. To learn more about the man and his legacy, visit longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu.

Reviews

"Recommended."--CHOICE
"Longmore's book wears its intelligence in its incisive commentary and concepts. Students and scholars could learn a lot from this book, including how to write about complex ideas in clear, readable prose. The book manages to do all this in thirteen tightly written chapters, plus introduction and conclusion...While concise, the book takes no shortcuts, being heavily or even exhaustively evidenced...Longmore's book is powerful and persuasive. It's also a great
pleasure to read, in the way that watching a master thinker is pleasurable. He thinks with material in impressive ways that seem effortless Scholars with other interests would no doubt see much else in
Longmore's book related to their interests, as there is a great deal in this fine book. We should all be grateful that Longmore wrote Telethons and that his colleagues did the work to make sure we could read it."--Disability Studies Quarterly
"Longmore explores a classic form of American kitch in a radically new way. Telethons shows us how the crass extravaganzas of pity and benevolence collided with new ideas about justice and dignity. The result is a fascinating tour of television, voluntarism, civil rights, and America itself."--James A. Morone, author of Hellfire Nation and The Devils We Know
"Just as Americans gathered around their televisions to watch the spectacle of telethons, so should all gather around Telethons. This long-awaited book smartly unravels the powerful but previously unexamined ties between public policy, business, popular culture, and ableist assumptions about disability. A pleasure to read, vibrating with Longmore's wit and intelligence, this book is marvelous."--Kim E. Nielsen, author of A Disability History of the United
States
"Telethons brilliantly explores a multifaceted and uniquely American innovation, the 'television marathon,' a spectacle that simultaneously raised vast funds for good causes, contributed in surprising ways to the advent of the disability rights movement, and disseminated to a television-viewing nation an image of disabled people as pitiable, helpless, and perpetually childlike."--Douglas C. Baynton, author of Forbidden Signs: American Culture and
the Campaign against Sign Language
"Telethons is Paul Longmore's posthumous tour de force. His history of the telethon gives readers a wide and expansive lens that reveals how this particularly American spectacle advances a skewed national mythology and ideology. This book is a must-read not just for students of culture and society about disability, disease, and medicine, but for anyone interested in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural and social American history."--Ruth
O'Brien, author of Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace