at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Though these problematic themes were common, not all disability representation in 19th-century children's literature was harmful. Dowker identifies a few examples in 19th-century literature in which the disabled characters were not helpless or saintly. The Pillars of the House (1873), The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), and The Fifth Form at St Dominics (1887) contain multidimensional disabled characters. The majority of 19th century disability representation reduced disabled characters to the "other" while preaching messages of obedience to God's will and moral lessons taught through suffering. 20th and 21st centuries United States In the United States, about 26% of the population has a disability, a slightly higher greater than the 17% worldwide figure. In 2019 only 3.4% of children's books published in the US had disabled main characters, Having children read about characters with disabilities, scholars suggest, helps promote acceptance and empathy. The approach of children and youth literature (collectively called "juvenile literature") can have a significant impact on the children reading it, whether they personally have experienced disability or not; literature "has proven to be an agent capable of influencing attitudes and acceptance of impairments". Stereotypes of disabilities could also have an impact on children, this may cause children to misunderstand and view disabilities in a negative way. From 1940 to 1970, around 311 books for children were published in the United States that included characters with disabilities as main characters. Some of these books romanticized the disability, some were infantilized, while others portrayed the disabled characters as avoiding the world. Such portrayals did not reflect lived reality; an oddity is that the portrayal of blind individuals exceeded their actual numbers in the real population. Blindness was noted as being the most common disability among African-American characters in children's fiction, used as a plot device to represent the ability to see beyond racial prejudices, making the disability secondary to its significance as a plot device. In 1986, the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) was put into force in the United States, which ended the exclusion of children with disabilities from publicly funded school systems. With the integration of children with disabilities into public schools, a new interest arose in representing disabled people in children's books. Barbara Holland Baskin and Karen H. Harris conducted influential research into the portrayal of disability in children and youth literature in the late 1970s. They