The New Disability History: American Perspectives

In the introduction to their anthology, Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky argue that disability history is “an underlying structure in all of history” and that historical questions often undergird the field of disability studies. With these claims, the editors assemble a collection of fourteen articles. Each essay grounds disability history in American history, and several use history to advance literary and policy studies. Among the latter, Douglas Baynton argues that disability has served as a basis for American citizenship. Citizenship is historically linked to equality, but also to normality. Metaphors of “abnormal” disability were applied to women, African Americans, and immigrants. Richard Scotch reviews twentieth-century disability policies. He argues that they were neither comprehensive nor congruent. Indeed, income maintenance and health care policies had little in common except for their linkage to “cookie cutter” views of work and to a medical model. Walter Hickel claims that federal officials shaped disability policies from assumptions about compensation for disabled World War I veterans. Those policies became “at once a medical construct established by physicians and a social construct established by legislators, administrators, and veterans.” Rosemarie Garland Thomson explores photographs of disabled people as “visual rhetorics.” Using nineteenth-century and contemporary images, she develops a taxonomy of four rhetorics: the wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, and the realistic.