DISABILITY HISTORIES

Dr. Jaipreet Virdi

University of Delaware, Fall 2020

“You might wonder why people should care about disability history if they do not have

disabilities themselves. The truth is that over time, disability will affect the lives of most Americans.”

-An op-ed written by 12

graders,

The New York Times (5 September 2018).

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This seminar introduces students to the historical variability of disability and the lived experiences of

disabled people to offer new interpretations of classic themes in American history, including gender,

race, class, and activism. We will explore disability as a cultural and historical phenomenon that is tied

to broader cultural attitudes and developments, such as immigration, medicine, capitalism, and labor.

This course is for PhD students to obtain historiographical knowledge for their examination fields and

MA students to obtain insight the representation and changing meanings of disability in society.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

• Introduce students to the major themes and trends in disability history scholarship

• Familiarize students with the nuances of disability definitions and analytical models

• Address the prevalence of disability in diverse histories

• Assist PhD students with preparation for qualifying exams

• Provide job training for students planning to establish careers in academia

• Enhance critical thinking and writing skills

• Develop an inclusive classroom with a respectful and engaged community

COURSE TEXTBOOKS

Susan Burch and Michael Rembis (eds.), Disability Histories (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois

Press, 2014).

Bess Williamson and Elizabeth Guffey (eds.), Making Disability Modern: Design Histories

(New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2020).

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean

(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2020).

ASSIGNMENTS & GRADING

Seminar Participation (20%)

Class discussions are opportunities for free exchange of ideas and debate. They are the heart of the seminar: a

chance for you to demonstrate your grasp of the readings and course themes, and a way for me to get to know

each of you. Active participation is essential for any seminar course. You are required to attend each class

prepared and ready to discuss the readings. It is a good idea to prepare by assembling a list of questions or critical

observations for each reading. Your mark will be assessed on the quality of your contributions and facilitation

with your peers. Come to class prepared to engage with the readings and participate in a respectful, fruitful

conversation.

Part of the participation grade will require you to facilitate discussion at least once during the semester on the

readings for the week. Send a list of 8-10 discussions to me the day before class with brief answers to the

questions. Focus the questions on the readings themselves: are there any key arguments that are problematic or

controversial? How does the author contextualize disability within the historical theme in their work(s)? Why is

this piece important? What sources are used and what presence do disabled people have in this work? You are

welcome to put together a presentation if you wish.

Book Review (20%)

Write a 1,000-1,200 word book review on a book on disability history that closely aligns with your

interests. Check under “Recommended Reading” for a list; PhD students are encouraged contact a Book

Reviews Editor of a journal to review recently published books for publication. These reviews should

contextualize the author(s)’ arguments within broader historiographical trends. Examine Reviews in

American History or H-Disability Reviews

for examples. Due in class on unit you selected.

Op-Ed Piece (20%)

One feature of being a historian is to address current events for a public unfamiliar with historical

scholarship. Write a 1,000-1,200 word essay in response to an issue that has made waves in the media,

or in response to media misconceptions of historical facts. You are encouraged (but not required) to

submit your piece for publication to popular blogs like Nursing Clio, Remedia, All of Us (the Disability

History Association blog), etc., or to general interest magazines like Slate, Vox, The Atlantic. This is

good practice for those wanting to venture into a career in public history. This is due whenever you find

something to write about.

Final Project (40%)

Your final project is designed for you to think about how disability fits in your relevant subfields or

special interests and how you can apply your learning from this seminar to other aspects of your

scholarship. You are to choose one of three options:

1. Historiographical Essay: A 8,000-10,000-words analysis of books and articles relevant to your

subfield/interests, contextualized to reflect a particular area of scholarship (e.g. Women’s History

/ U.S. History / World History / Queer & Crip Theory, etc.).

2. Research Essay: A 8,000-10,000 words argumentative essay supported by primary sources and

secondary scholarship to support your thesis, with a full bibliography.

3. Research / Grant Proposal: In your academic career, you will find that writing research and

grant proposals can be just as invasive as writing their dissertation or thesis. It is good practice to

know how to strategize your proposal to address an engaging historical question you wish to

answer, why this project is relevant, and where it fits within broader historiography. Include a list

of primary sources that are crucial for supporting your research question. Demonstrate originality

and familiarity with scholarship and archives. Look at the types of grants and fellowships you

aspire to apply for guidance on how to write this, but proposals should be approximately 15 pages

long with a 2-page bibliography.

Your final project will be due on the last day of class. You are required to make an appointment with me

sometime during the semester to discuss your final project and receive permission for your topic.

POLICIES

Statement of Diversity and Inclusion

Since technically, the class is based at the University of Delaware, we are gathering on the ancestral

territory of the Unami-speaking Lenape people. This class is an inclusive learning environment and I am

committed to ensuring all students are respected and valued. My intention is to view student diversity in

identity and background as a crucial source of strength. This course aims to provide materials and

activities to present inclusive histories with respect to gender, sexuality, race, disability, class, culture,

and ethnicity. It is expected that for all class activities and discussions, we will together contribute to

enriching our learning environment by being respectful of the diversity of thoughts, perspectives, and

experiences by listening to others’ views. This means all personal attacks or insults that degrade

someone’s character will not be tolerated. I will gladly honor any requests to address an alternate name

or gender pronoun. Please advise me at the start of the semester.

Special Corona Edition

No doubt we are going to be experiencing plenty of unpredictable circumstances during this semester. I

am committed to ensuring that this class progresses as smoothly as possible and am here to provide

flexibility when needed. We will be having synchronous seminars on GoogleMeet (because it has closed

captioning, and you can phone in if video is not suitable); in addition, the Canvas course page features

spaces for asynchronous discussion and engagement. We can also use email threads for discussions.

Accessibility

If you have any specific personal and/or academic accessibility requirements (learning disability,

physical disability, language comprehension, etc.), I welcome you to speak with me or email me to let

me know how to best accommodate your needs, especially if you don’t have an apparent disability, have

ongoing health issues or are trying to pass. You are NOT obligated to disclose any of these issues with

me, only specify if there’s any accommodations required. Trust me when I say I’ll understand. If you

need any adaptations for course materials (large font, pacing, image description, closed captioning), this

is easy for me to do, so let me know. You are also encouraged to register with the

Office of Disability

Support Services, but it is not a requirement.

Academic Honesty

The University of Delaware Student Guide to Academic Honesty indicates:

“All students must be honest and forthright in their academic studies. To falsify the results of

one’s research, to steal the words or ideas of another, to cheat on an assignment, or to allow or

assist another to commit these acts corrupts the educational process. Students are expected to do

their own work and neither give nor receive unauthorized assistance.”

Read the Statement and outline of violations in plagiarism and cheating:

http://www1.udel.edu/stuguide/17-18/code.html#honesty

Title Image: Disabled and paralysed people lying outside a wall of the cemetery Santo Spirito in Rome begging for

alms. Colored lithography by F. Villian after A.J.-B. Thomas, 1823. Wellcome Collection

Historiography: What is Disability History? Optional Pre-Semester Reads

Recommended Readings

Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press,

1990).

David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Synder, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses on Disability (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1997).

H.J. Striker, A History of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

Robert L. Osgood, “The Menace of the Feebleminded: George Bliss, Amos Butler, and the Indiana Committee on Mental

Defectives,” Indiana Magazine of History 97.4 (2001): 253-277.

Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umanski, The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: NYU Press,

2001).

Katherine Ott, “Disability and the Practice of Public History: An Introduction,” The Public Historian, 27.2 (2005): 9-24.

Anne Quartararo, Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet

University Press, 2008).

Geoffrey Reaume, “Disability History in Canada: Present Work in the Field and Future Prospects,” Canadian Journal of

Disability Studies, 1.1 (2012): 35-81.

Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012).

Fred Pelka, What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2012).

Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Champan, and Alison C. Carey, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the U.S.

and Canada (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Alison M. Parker, “Intersecting Histories of Gender, Race, and Disability,” Journal of Women’s History 27.1 (Spring

2015): 178-186.

Sari Altschuler and Cristobal Silva, “Early American Disability Studies,” Early American Literature 52.1 (2017): 1-27.

Molly Ladd-Taylor, Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2017).

Monstrosity / Normality September 3

Required Readings

Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History:

American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33-

57.

Holly E. Martin, “Cheng and Eng Bunker, ‘The Original Siamese Twins’: Living, Dying, and Continuing under the

Spectator’s Gaze,” The Journal of American Culture 34.4 (December 2011): 372-88.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “The Cultural Work of American Freak Shows, 1835-1940,” in Extraordinary Bodies:

Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 55-80.

Leslie J. Reagan, “Monstrous Births, Birth Defects, Unusual Anatomy, and Disability in Europe and North America,” in

The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2018), 385-406.

Recommended Readings

Robert Bodgan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 1988).

Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers

Press, [1993] 1994).

Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso Press, 1995).

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 2001).

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Anna G. Creadick, Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (Amherst & Boston: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2010).

David Wright, Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Jennifer Esmail, Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ohio: Ohio

University Press, 2013).

Gerald V. O’Brien, Framing the Moron: The Social Construction of Feeble-Mindedness in the American Eugenic Era

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, Normality: A Critical Genealogy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago

Press, 2017).

Anna Creadick, “Disability’s Other: The Production of “Normal Men” in Midcentury America,” in Phallacies: Historical

Intersections of Disability and Masculinity, eds. Kathleen M. Brian and James W. Trent Jr., (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2018), 25-43.

Bondage September 10

Required Readings

Dea H. Boster, “’Unfit for Ordinary Purposes:’ Disability, Slaves, and Decision Making in the Antebellum American

South,” in Disability Histories 201-217.

Jenifer L. Barclay, “Mothering the “Useless”: Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery,” Women, Gender, and Families

of Color 2.2 (Fall 2014): 115-140.

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press,

2020).

Recommended Readings

Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940 (Durham:

University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

Hannah Joyner, From Pity to Pride: Growing up Deaf in the Old South (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press,

2004).

Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner, Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson (Durham: University of North Carolina Press,

[2007] 2015).

Lavonna Lovern, “Native American Worldview and the Discourse on Disability,” Essays in Philosophy 9.1 2008).

Jim Downs, “The Continuation of Slavery: The Experience of Disabled Slaves during Emancipation,” Disability Studies

Quarterly (2008), 28.3.

Dea H. Boster, “’I made up my mind to act both deaf and dumb:’ Displays of Disability and Slave Resistance in the

Antebellum American South,” in Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity (Temple University Press, 2013).

Alison Parker, “’The Picture of Health:’ The Public Life and Private Ailments of Mary Church Terrell,” in “Disability and

Disclosure” Special Issue, ed. Alison Parker, Journal of Historical Biography 13 (Spring 2013): 164-207.

H.N. Weaver, “Disability through a Native American Lens: Examining Influences of Culture and Colonization,” Journal

of Social Work in Disability and Rehabilitation 14 (July 2015): 148-162.

Whitney Womack Smith, “’Blind Tom’ Abroad: Race, Disability, and Transatlantic Representations of Thomas Wiggins,”

Journal of Transatlantic Studies 14.2 (2016): 164-75.

Stefanie Kennedy, “’Let them be young and stoutly set in limbs’: Race, Labor, and Disability in the British Atlantic

World,” in Disability and Colonialism: (Dis)encounters and Anxious Intersectionalities, eds. Karen Soldatic and Shaun

Grech (New York and London: Routledge, 2016): 37-52.

Stefanie Kennedy and Melanie J. Newton, “The Hauntings of Slavery: Colonialism and the Disabled Body in the

Caribbean,” in Disability in the Global South: The Critical Handbook, eds. Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic, (New York:

Springer, 2016), 379-92.

Therí A. Pickens, “Blue Blackness, Black Blueness: Making Sense of Blackness and Disability,” African American

Review 50.2 (2017): 93-103.

Jenifer L. Barclay, “Disability, Race, and Gender on the Stage in Antebellum America,” in The Oxford Handbook of

Disability History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2018), 351- 368.

Colonialism September 17

Required Readings

Esme Cleall, “Orientalising Deafness: Disability and Race in Imperial Britain, c.19th,” Social Identities 21.1 (Spring

2015): 22-36.

Aparna Nair, “’They Shall See His Face’: Blindness in British India, 1850-1950,” Medical History 61.2 (2017): 181-199.

Aparna Nair, “‘These Curly-Bearded, Olive-Skinned Warriors’: Medicine, Prosthetics, Rehabilitation and the Disabled

Sepoy in the First World War, 1914-1920,” Social History of Medicine 33.3 (2020): 798-818.

Aparna Nair, “Of Ear Trumpets, Audiphones, and the ‘Language of the Fingers’ (Kar Pallavi Bhasha): Technologies for

the Deaf in British India, 1850-1950,” in Making Disability Modern.

Recommended Readings

Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Mentalités and Marginality: Blindness and the Mamlūk Civilization,” in The Islamic World from

Classical to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis, eds. Clifford Edmind Bosworth et al. (Princeton, NJ:

Darwin Press, 1989), 211-38.

Beverly Earnshaw, “The Lame, the Blind, the Mad, the Malingerers: Sick and Disabled Convicts within the Colonial

Community,” Journal of the Australian Historical Society 81 (1995): 25-38.

Lilah Morton Pengra and Joyzelle Gingway Godfrey, “Different Boundaries, Different Barriers: Disability Studies and

Lakota Culture,” Disability Studies Quarterly 21.3 (2001).

Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, c.1840-1900 (London:

Palgrave Macmillian, 2012).

Claire Edington, “Going in and Getting out of the Colonial Asylum: Families and Psychiatric Care in French Indochina,”

Comparative Studies in Society and History 55.3 (2013): 725-755.

Sara Scalenghe, Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Esme Cleall, “Producing and Managing Deviance in the Disabled Colonial Self: John Kitto, the Deaf Traveller,” in

Subverting Empire, eds. W. Jackson and E.J. Manktelow (eds.), Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

(London: Palgrave McMillian, 2015), 126-4.

Shaun Grech, “Decolonising Eurocentric Disability Studies: Why Colonialism Matters in the Disability and Global South

Debate,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 21 (2015): 6-21.

Gildas Brégain, “Colonialism and Disability: The Situation of Blind People in Colonised Algeria,” Alter 10.2 (2016): 148-

167.

Pieter Verstraete, Evelyne Verhaegen, and Mark Depaepe, “One Difference is Enough: Towards a History of Disability in

the Belgian-Congo, 1908-1960,” in Ivan Brown, Nancy E. Hansen, and Roy Hanes (eds.), The Routledge History of

Disability (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017).

Esme Cleall, “Jane Groom and the Deaf Colonists: Empire, Emigration and the Agency of Deaf People in the C19 British

Empire,” History Workshop Journal 81.1 (2016): 39-61.

Sara Scalenghe, “Disability in the Premodern Arab World,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, eds. Michael

Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 71-83.

Gender/Sexuality September 24

Required Readings

Laura Micheletti Puaca, “The Largest Occupational Group of All the Disabled: Homemakers with Disabilities and

Vocational Rehabilitation in Postwar America,” in Disabling Domesticity, ed. Michael Rembis (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2017), 73-102.

Audra Jennings, “Engendering and Regendering Disability: Gender and Disability Activism in Postwar America,” in

Disability Histories, 345-364.

Regina Kunzel, “The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States,” in The Oxford Handbook

of Disability History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2018), 459-475.

Jennifer Helgren, “Gender, Civic Fitness, and Disability in Post-World War II American Youth Organizations,” in Susan

Eckelmann Berghel, Sara Fieldston, and Paul M. Renfro (eds.), Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945

(University of Georgia Press, (2019), 95-113.

Recommended Readings

James Emmett Ryan, “The Blind Authoress of New York: Helen de Kroyft and the Uses of Disability in Antebellum

America,” American Quarterly 51.2 (1999): 385-418.

David Serlin, “Crippling Masculinity: Queerness and Disability in U.S. Military Culture, 1800-1945,” Gay and Lesbian

Quarterly 9 (2003): 149-179.

David Serlin, “Christine Jorgensen and the Cold War Closet,” in Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar

America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 159-190.

Catherine Kudlick, “Modernity’s Miss-Fits: Blind Girls and Marriage in France and America, 1820-1920,” in Rudolph M.

Bell and Virgina Yans (eds.), Women on their Own: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Being Single (New Jersey: Rutgers

University Press, 2008), 201-218.

Phyllis E. Reske, "Policing the 'Wayward Woman': Eugenics in Wisconsin's Involuntary Sterilization," The Wisconsin

Magazine of History 97.1 (2013): 14-27.

Esme Cleall, “’Deaf to the World:’ Gender, Deafness, and Protestantism in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland,”

Gender & History 25.3 (2013): 590-603.

Susan Burch, “Dislocated Histories: The Canton Asylum for Insane Indians,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 2.2.

(2014): 141-62.

Beth Linker and Whitney Laemmi, “Half a Man: The Symbolism and Science of Paraplegic Impotence in World War II

America,” Osiris 30.1 (2015): 228-249.

Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

Paul K. Longmore, “Smashing Icons: Gender, Sexuality, and Disability,” in Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the

Business of Charity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 137-153.

Joseph McBrinn, “’The work of masculine fingers’: The Disabled Soldiers’ Embroidery Industry, 1918-1955,” Journal of

Design History 31 (2018): 1-23.

Kim E. Nielsen, Money, Marriage, and Madness: The Life of Anna Ott (University of Illinois Press, 2020).

Immigration/Eugenics October 1

Required Readings

Douglas Baynton, “‘These Pushful Days’: Time and Disability in the Age of Eugenics,” Health and History 13.2 (2011):

43-64.

Natalia Molina, “Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early-Twentieth-Century United

States,” Radical History Review 94 (Winter 2006): 22-37.

Janet Golden and John T. Duffy, “‘Normal Enough’: Paula Patton, Intellectually Disabled Immigrant Children, and the

1924 Immigration Act,” Journal of Social History 53.3 (2020): 792-816.

Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Coping with a ‘Public Menace’: Eugenic Sterilization in Minnesota,” Minnesota History 59-6

(2005): 237-248.

Gregory Michael Dorr, “Defective or Disabled?: Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and

Alabama,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5.4 (2006): 359-392.

Recommended Readings

Katherine Castles, “Quiet Eugenics: Sterilization in North Carolina’s Institutions for the Mentally Retarded, 1945-1965,”

The Journal of Southern History 68.4 (2002): 849-878.

David Mitchell & Sharon Synder, “The Eugenic Atlantic: Race, Disability and the Making of an International Eugenic

Science, 1800-1945,” Disability & Society 18.7 (2003): 843-64.

Penny L. Richards, “Points of Entry: Disability and the historical Geography of Immigration,” Disability Studies

Quarterly 24.3 (2004).

Douglas Baynton, “’The Undesirability of Admitting Deaf Mutes’: American Immigration Policy and Deaf Immigrants,

1882-1924,” Sign Language Studies 6.4 (2006): 391-415.

Ena Chadna, “’Mentally Defectives’ Not Welcome: Mental Disability in Canadian Immigration Law, 1859-1927,”

Disability Studies Quarterly 28 (2008).

Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, The Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: The

Johns Hopkins Press, 2008).

Daniel J. Wilson, “‘No Defectives Need Apply’: Disability and Immigration,” OAH Magazine of History 23.3 (2009): 35-

40.

Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

Andrew A. Gentes, “’Completely Useless’: Exiling the Disabled to Tsarist Siberia,” Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of

Siberian Studies 10.2 (2011): 26-49.

Ruth Balint, “Children Left Behind: Family, Refugees, and Immigration in Postwar Europe,” History Workshop Journal

82.1 (2016): 151-72.

Douglas Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 2016).

Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability

(Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2018).

Citizenry/Civic Fitness October 8

Required Readings

Douglas Baynton, “Slaves, Immigrants, and Suffragists: The Uses of Disability in Citizenship Debates,” PMLA 120.2

(2005): 562-567.

Daniel Blackie,” Disability, Dependency, and the Family in the Early United States,” in Disability Histories, 17-34.

Kim E. Nielsen, “Property, Disability, and the Making of the Incompetent Citizen in the United States, 1860s-1940s,” in

Disability Histories, 308-20.

Allison C. Carey, “Professionals and the Potentially Productive Citizen,” in On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual

Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 83-104.

Aimi Hamraie, “All Americans: Disability, Race, and Segregated Citizenship,” in Building Access: Universal Design and

the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017), 65-93.

Required Readings

Len Barton, “The Struggle for Citizenship: The Case of Disabled Person,” Disability, Handicap & Society 8.3 (1993):

235-248.

Julie Livingston, “Insight from an African History of Disability,” Radical History Review 94 (Winter 2006): 111-26.

Alison C. Carey, On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth Century America

(Temple University Press, 2009).

Kim E. Nielsen, “Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives,

eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 236-290.

R.A.R. Edwards, Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture (New York

and London: New York University Press, 2012).

Julie Avril Minch, Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (Temple

University Press, 2013).

Kate Rossiter and Annalise Clarkson, “Opening Ontario’s ‘Saddest Chapter:’ A Social History of Huronia Regional

Centre,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 2.3 (2013); 1-30.

Heli Leppälä, “Duty to Entitlement: Work and Citizenship in the Finnish Post-War Disability Policy, early 1940s to

1970,” Social History of Medicine 27.1 (2014): 144-164.

Nancy Hirschmann and Beth Linker (eds.), Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Jennifer Van Horn, “Crafting Citizens,” in The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 342-401.

Patrick McDonagh, C.F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton (eds.), Intellectual Disability: A Conceptual History 1200-1900

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

Lindsey Patterson, “The Disability Rights Movement in the United States,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability

History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 439-457.

Medicine October 15

Required Readings

Stephen Pemberton, “The Curious Case of the ‘Professional Hemophiliac:’ Medicine, Disability and the Contested Value

of Normality,” in Disability Histories 237-357.

Elsbeth Bösl, “The Contergan Scandal: Media, Medicine, and Thalidomide in 1960s West Germany,” in Disability

Histories, 136-62.

Marion Andrea Schmidt, “Concerned and Puzzled: Heredity Research and Counselling at the Clarke School, 1930-1960,”

in Eradicating Deafness? Genetics, Pathology, and Diversity in Twentieth-Century America (Manchester University Press

2020), 43-70.

Beth Linker and Emily K. Abel, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Disease History: Tuberculosis and its Past,” in

Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, Belonging, eds. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Beth Linker (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 83-102.

Recommended Readings

Erin O’Connor, “’Fractions of Men:’ Engendering Amputation in Victorian Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society &

History 39.4 (1994): 742-778.

Martin s. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion

Pictures Since 1915 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Benson Bobric, Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

Sally Aitken, Helen D’Orazio and Stewart Valin, Walking Fingers: The Story of Polio and Those who Lived with It

(Montreal: Vehicule Press, 2004).

Jana Grekul, Harvey Krahn, and Dave Odynak, “Sterilizing the ‘Feeble-Minded’: Eugenics in Alberta, Canada, 1929-

1972,” Journal of Historical Sociology 17.4 (2004): 358-84.

Daniel J. Wilson, Living with Polio: The Epidemic and its Survivors (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).

David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Yolando Eraso, “Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization: The Practice of Eugenics in the Treatment of Argentinian

Women during the 1930s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81.3 (2007): 793-882.

Andrew J. Hogan, “Moving Away from the ‘Medical Model’: The World Health Organization’s Classification of

Disability,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 92.2 (2019): 241-269.

Leslie J. Reagan, “Specter of Tragedy,” in Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern

America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 55-104.

Russell L. Johnson, “‘Disease is Unrhythmical’: Jazz, Health, and Disability in 1920s America,” Health and History 13.2

(2011): 13-42.

Liz Ross, Phil Lyon, and Craig Cathcart, “Pills, Potions and Devices: Treatments for Hearing Loss Advertised in Mid-

Nineteenth-Century British Newspapers,” Social History of Medicine 27.3 (2014): 530-56.

Jaipreet Virdi, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020).

Measuring October 29

Required Readings

Andrea Zittlau, “Pathologizing Bodies: Medical Portrait Photography in Nineteenth-Century America,”

Amerikastudien/American Studies 58.4 (2013): 543-558.

Beth Linker, “A Dangerous Curve: The Role of History in America’s Scoliosis Screening Programs,” American Journal

of Public Health 102.4 (2012): 606-616.

Coreen McGuire, “The Categorization of Hearing Loss through Telephony in Inter-War Britain,” History and Technology

35.2 (2019): 139-155.

Coreen McGuire, “The Spirometer and the Normal Subjects,” in Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the

Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period (Manchester University Press, 2020).

Recommended Readings

Stefan Timmermans and Valerie Leiter, “The Redemption of Thalidomide: Standardizing the Risk of Birth Defects,”

Social Studies of Science 30.1 (2000): 41-71.

Brian Woods and Nick Watson, “In Pursuit of Standardization: The British Ministry of Health’s Model 8F Wheelchair,

1948-1962,” Technology and Culture 45.3 (2004): 540-568.

Anne Borsay, “Disciplining Disabled Bodies: The Development of Orthopaedic Medicine in Britain, c.1800-1939,” in

Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, eds. David Turner and Kevin Stagg (New York: Routledge, 2006), 97-115.

Joseph Melling, “Beyond a Shadow of Doubt? Experts, Lay Knowledge, and the Role of Radiography in the Diagnosis of

Silicosis in Britain, c.1919-1945,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84.3 (2010): 424-466.

Amos Morris-Reich, “Anthropology, Standardization and Measurement: Rudolf Martin and Anthropometric

Photography,” The British Journal for the History of Science 46.3 (2013): 487-516.

A.R. Ruis, “‘Children with Half-Starved Bodies’ and the Assessment of Malnutrition in the United States, 1890-1950,”

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87.3 (2013): 378-406.

Andrew J. Hogan, “Making the Most of Uncertainty: Treasuring exceptions in prenatal diagnosis.” Studies in History and

Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57 (2016): 24-33.

Andrew J. Hogan, “From Precaution to Peril: Public relations over forty years of genetic engineering.” Endeavour 40, no.

4 (2016): 218-222.

Graeme Gooday and Karen Sayer, Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss in Britain, 1830-1930 (London: Palgrave

McMillian, 2017).

Danielle Coriale, “Reading through Deafness: Francis Galton and the Strange Science of Psychophysis,” in Strange

Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (University of Michigan Press, 2017) 105-124.

Jaipreet Virdi and Coreen McGuire, “Phyllis M. Tookey Kerridge and the Science of Audiometric Standardization in

Britain,” British Journal for the History of Science 51.1 (2018): 123-146.

Coreen McGuire, “‘X-Rays don’t tell lies’: The Medical Research Council and the Measurement of Respiratory

Disability,” British Journal for the History of Science 52.3 (2019): 447-465.

Warfare November 5

Required Readings

John M. Kinder, “’Lest we Forget:’ Disabled Veterans and the Politics of War Remembrance in the United States,” in

Disability Histories, 163-82.

Paul R.D. Lawrie, “’Salvaging the Negro:’ Race, Rehabilitation, and the Body Politic in World War I America, 1917-

1924,” in Disability Histories, 321-44.

Julie Anderson, “British Women, Disability, and the Second World War,” Contemporary British History 20 (2006): 37-

53.

Sarah Handley-Cousins, “Gather the Invalids,” in Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North (University of Georgia

Press, 2019), 11-32.

Recommended Readings

Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 1996).

Deborah Cohen, The War Came Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939 (Berkley: The University

of California Press, 2001).

Robert F. Jefferson Jr., “Enabled Courage: Race, Disability and Black World War II Veterans in Postwar America,” The

Historian 65.5 (2003): 1102-1124.

Audra Jennings, Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

David Serlin, “Disability, Masculinity, and the Prosthetics of War, 1945-2005,” in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a

Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, eds. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, London: The MIT

Press, 2006), 155-183.

Katherine Feo, “Invisibility: Memory, Masks and Masculinities in the Great War,” Journal of Design History 20 (2007):

17-27.

Julie Anderson, War, Disability, and Rehabilitation in Britain: “Soul of a Nation” (Manchester: University of Manchester

Press, 2011).

Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Guy R. Hasegawa, Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs (Southern

Illinois University Press, 2012).

Sue Wheatcroft, Worth Saving: Disabled Children during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 2013).

Anita Magowska, “The Unwanted Heroes: War Invalids in Poland after World War I,” Journal of the History of Medicine

and Allied Sciences 69.2 (2014): 184-220.

Heather R. Perry, Recycling the Disabled: Army, Medicine, and Modernity in WWI Germany (Manchester University

Press, 2014).

Capitalism November 12

Required Readings

Caroline Lieffers, “Artificial Limbs on the Panama Canal,” in Making Disability Modern.

Daniel Blackie, “Disability and Work During the Industrial Revolution in Britain,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability

History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 177-95.

Sarah F. Rose, No Right to be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s (Durham: The University of North Carolina

Press, 2017), Selections.

Recommended Readings

Lisa Herschbach, “Prosthetic Reconstruction: Making the Industry, Re-Making the Body, Modelling the Nation,” History

Workshop Journal 44 (1997): 22-57.

Robert M. Buchanan, Illusions of Equality: Deaf Americans in School and Factory, 1850-1950 (Washington, D.C.:

Gallaudet University Press, 1999).

Edward Slavishak, “Artificial Limbs and Industrial Workers’ Bodies in Turn-of-The-Century Pittsburgh,” Journal of

Social History 37.2 (2003): 365-388.

Sarah Rose, “‘Crippled’ Hands: Disability in Labor and Working Class History,” Labor: Studies in the Working-Class

History of the Americans 2.1 (Spring 2005): 27-54.

Máirtín Ó Catháin, “’Blind, But Not to the Hard Facts of Life’” The Blind Workers’ Struggle in Derry, 1928-1940,”

Radical History Review 94 (Winter 2006): 9-21.

José Martinez-Pérez, “The Recovered Worker: Occupational Medicine, Orthopedics, and the Impact of Medical Technology

on the Social Image of Persons With Disabilities (Spain, 1922-36). Historia, Ciencias, Saude Manguinhos 13.2 (2006): 55-

76.

Dustin Galer, “’A Place to Work Like any Other?’ Sheltered Workshops in Canada, 1970-1985,” Canadian Journal of

Disability Studies 3.2 (2014).

Jane Buckingham, “Disability and Work in South Asia and the United Kingdom,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability

History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 197-211.

Jeff D. Grischow, “Disability and Work in British West Africa,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, eds.

Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 213-227.

Audra Jennings, “Organized Labor and Disability in Post-World War II United States,” in The Oxford Handbook of

Disability History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2018), 247-61.

Paul Lawrie, “Race, Work, and Disability in Progressive Era United States,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability

History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 229-246.

David M. Turner and Daniel Blackie, Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining,

1780-1880 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

Dustin Galer, Working Toward Equity: Disability Rights Activism and Employment in Late Twentieth-Century Canada

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

Design November 19

Required Readings

Elizabeth Guffey and Bess Williamson, “Introduction: Rethinking Design History through Disability, Rethinking

Disability Through Design,” in Making Disability Modern.

Elizabeth Guffey, “The Ideologies of Designing for Disability,” in Making Disability Modern.

Wanda Katja Liebermann, “Humanizing Modernism? Jaap Bakema’s Het Dorp, a Village for Disabled Citizens,” Journal

of the Society of Architectural Historians 75.2 (2016): 158-81.

Aimi Hamraie, “Sloped Technoscience: Curb Cuts, Critical Frictions, and Disability (Maker) Cultures,” in Building

Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017), 95-130.

Recommended Readings

Michael J. Prince, “Inclusive City Life: Persons with Disabilities and the Politics of Difference,” Disability Studies

Quarterly 28.1 (2008).

Graham Pullin, Design Meets Disability (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2009).

Brandan Gleeson, “Domestic Space and Disability in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne, Australia,” Journal of Historical

Geography 27.2 (April 2011): 223-240.

Tanya Titchkosky, The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,2011).

Aimi Hamraie, “Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design,” Disability Studies

Quarterly 33.4 (2013).

Bill McCoy, “Leprosy, Piety, and Identity: The Mbuluzi Leprosy Hospital as Informal Pilgrimage Site, 1948-92,” Studies

in World Christianity 20.1 (2014): 54-69.

Amy Merrick, “Designing for Disability

,” The New Yorker (16 April 2015).

Jay Dolmage, “From steep steps to retrofit to universal design, from collapse to austerity: neo-liberal spaces of disability,”

in Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader, ed. Jos Boys (New York: London and New York, 2017), 102-113.

Elizabeth Guffey, Designing Disability: Symbols, Space, and Society (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

Cassandra Hartblay, “Good Ramps, Bad Ramps: Centralized Design Standards and Disability Access in Urban Russian

Infrastructure,” American Ethnologist 44.1 (2017): 9-22.

Bess Williamson, “Designing Objects and Spaces: A Modern Disability History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability

History, eds. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 141-159.

Margaret Andersen, “Why Accessible Design Isn’t a Niche Market,”

Eye on Design (13 February 2018).

Penny Wolfson, Enwheeled: History, Design, and the Wheelchair (New York: Cooper Hewitt, 2018).

Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020).

Sara Hendren, What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World (Penguin Random House, 2020).

Things December 3

Required Readings

Katherine Ott, “Disability Things: Material Culture and American Disability History, 1700-2010,” in Disability Histories,

119-35.

Nicole Belolan, “The Material Culture of Gout in Early America,” in Making Disability Modern.

Cara Kiernan Fallon, “Walking Cane Style and Medicalized Mobility,” in Making Disability Modern.

Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, “The Politics and Logics of Ergonomic Design,” in Making Disability Modern.

Recommended Readings

Reed Benhamou, “The Artificial Limb in Preindustrial France,” Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 835-845.

Mary Guyatt, “Better Legs,” Journal of Design History, 14.4 (2001): 207-325.

Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (eds.), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics

(New York and London: New York University Press, 2002).

Trevor Pinch and Nelly Oudshoorn, How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology (Cambridge, The

MIT Press, 2005).

John Oilphant,“’Touching the Light:’ The Invention of Literacy for the Blind.” Paedagogica Historica 44 (2008): 67-82.

Vanessa Warne, “’To Invest a Cripple with Peculiar Interest:’ Artificial Legs and Upper Class Amputees at Mid-

Century,” Victorian Review 35.2 (2009): 83-100.

Edward Slavishak, ‘”The Ten Year Club:’ Artificial Limbs and Testimonials at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in

Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace: Emulation, Identity, Community, eds. Marlis Schweitzer and Marina

Moskowitz (New York: Palgrave Mcmillian, 2010), 95-121.

Vanessa Warne, “’So That the Sense of Touch May Supply the Want of Sight:’ Blind Reading and Nineteenth Century

British Print Culture,” in Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth-Century: Image, Sound, Touch, eds. C.

Colligan and M. Linley (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 43-64.

Mara Mills, “Hearing and the History of Electronics Miniaturization,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 11 (2011):

24-44.

David M. Turner and Alun Withey, “Technologies of the Body: Polite Consumption and the Correction of Deformity in

Eighteenth-Century England,” History 99 (2014): 775-96.

Nicole Belolan, “’Confined to Crutches,’” James Logan and the Material Culture of Disability in Early America,”

Pennsylvania Legacies 17.2 (2017): 6-11.

Claire L. Jones (ed.), Rethinking Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures, 1820-1930 (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2017).

Fady Shanouda, “Playing with Normalcy: A Disability Material Culture Analysis,” Review of Disability Studies: An

International Journal 15.2 (2019).

Gemma Almond, “Why the anonymous and everyday objects are important: Using the Science Museum’s collections to

re-write the history of vision aids,” Science Museum Group Journal 13 (2020).

Lived Experiences/Histories December 10

Required Readings

Bess Williamson, “3D-Printed Prosthetics and the Uses of Design,” in Making Disability Modern.

Jaipreet Virdi, “Materializing User Identities & Digital Humanities,” in Making Disability Modern.

Liz Jackson, “We are the Original Lifehackers

,” The New York Times (30 May 2018).

s.e. smith, “Disabled people don’t need so many fancy new gadgets. We just need more ramps

,” Vox (30 April 2019).

Alice Wong, “Introduction,” in Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (Vintage Books,

2020), xv-xxii.

Recommended Readings

Douglas Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 1996).

James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment (University of California

Press, 2000).

Susan Burch, Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II (New York: New York

University Press, 2002).

Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Temple University Press, 2003).

Kim E. Nielsen, The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

Diane F. Britton, Barbara Floyd, and Patricia A. Murphy, “Overcoming Another Obstacle: Archiving a Community’s

Disabled History,” Radical History Review 94 (Winter 2006): 212-27.

Fikru Negash Gebrekidan, “Disability Rights Activism in Keyna, 1959-1964: History from Below,” African Studies

Review 55.3 (December 2012): 103-22.

Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thompson (eds.), Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency

in the Museum (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2013).

Lydia X.Y. Brown, E. Ashkenazy, Morenike Giwa Onaiwu (eds.), All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living with

Racialized Autism (Lincoln, Nebraska: DragonBee Press, 2017).

Scott Danforth, “Becoming the Rolling Quads: Disability Politics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s,”

History of Education Quarterly 58.4 (2018): 506-536.

Jennifer L. Erkulwater, “How the Nation’s Largest Minority Became White: Race Politics and the Disability Rights

Movement, 1970-1980,” Journal of Policy History 30.3 (July 2018): 367-99.

Laura Jaffee and Kelsey John, “Disabling Bodies of/and Land: Reframing Disability Justice in conversation with

Indigenous Theory and Activism,” Disability and the Global South 5.2 (2018): 1407-1429.

Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Geber, Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education (University of Illinois

Press, 2020).