Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / On July 20, 1968, the first-ever International Special Olympics Games took place in Chicago, Illinois. The following year, two Indiana State University (ISU) professors established Indiana Special Olympics (ISO) and took on the task of not only planning an annual competition, but also developing training programs and smaller events throughout the state. The organization maintained headquarters on the ISU campus before relocating to Indianapolis in 1989. Over ISO’s first two decades, its small staff expanded its sports programming in the face of financial and logistical challenges. Despite being an athletics organization, ISO focused on more than improving the physical fitness of its participants. The organization intended to change society’s negative views of people with mental disabilities by increasing public awareness and societal inclusion of such individuals. In this effort, how ISO depicted people with mental disabilities had significance. This thesis explores ISO’s growth from 1969 to 1989 and argues that ISO did not create a consistent image of people with intellectual disabilities during this time period. Instead, it conveyed and implied multiple depictions that sometimes contradicted each other. The divergent portrayals reveal that ISO developed at a time when people were both maintaining historical conceptions of disability and creating new ones.

Indianapolis / This thesis examines the evolution of the adolescent sex education during from 1907 to 1975, from the perspective of Indiana and highlights the contingencies, continuities, and discontinuities across place and time. This period represents the establishment of the defining characteristics of sex education in Indiana as locally controlled and school-based, as well as the Social Health Association’s transformation from one of a number of local social hygiene organizations to the nation’s only school based social health agency. Indiana was not a local exception to the American sex education movement, but SHA was exceptional for SHA its organizational longevity, adaptation, innovation in school-based curriculum, and national leadership in sex education. Indiana sex education leadership seems, at first glance, incongruous due to Indiana’s conservative politics. SHA’s efforts to adapt the message, curriculum, and operation in Indiana’s conservative climate helped it endure and take leadership role on a national stage. By 1975, sex education came to be defined as school based, locally controlled and based on the medicalization of health, yet this growing national consensus belied deep internal contradictions where sex education was not part of the regular school health curriculum and outside of the schools’ control. Underlying this story is fundamental difference between social hygiene and health, that hygiene is a set of practices to prevent disease, while health is an internal state to promote wellness.