Sensitive and sweeping, this is a history of the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England, to the nineteenth-century asylum, to care in today’s society.

Those They Called Idiots traces the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England to the nineteenth-century asylum, to care in today’s society. Using evidence from civil and criminal courtrooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels, art, and caricature, it explores the explosive intermingling of ideas about intelligence and race, while bringing into sharp focus the lives of people often seen as the most marginalized in society.