Acknowledgments
I want to especially thank Shirley Berenstein and her assistant Dana Bilsky without whose cooperation this document would never have been completed.
In addition, my gratitude to Gunnar Dybwad, former Executive Director of the National Association for Retarded Children and currently Director of the Samuel Gridley Howe Library on the grounds of the Fernald School in Boston, who provided access to his historical files and to those of Elizabeth Boggs.
I would also like to acknowledge the role of Michael Goldfarb in helping to conceive this project, in considering and hiring me, and for the many hours of stimulating conversations that were a side-benefit of this writing. Finally my appreciation to all those who were interviewed, both formally and informally, and who contributed to my understanding of AHRC and of the parents’ movement in the field of mental retardation.
“Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or spectator of the action he describes.”
– Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World, (Introduction), 1865.