Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"With this work, Longmore and Umansky offer historians, sociologists and other readers intrigued by this area of scholarship an opportunity to understand disabilities as broader and more complex than a single, generic and primarily medical category." * Publishers Weekly *
"A cause for celebration. The insights popping off of each page are rich, compelling, and memorable. Taken together, these essays hold as much promise for remaking general understanding of the American past as pathbreaking works in women's history and African-American history. By bringing to center stage the experiences of so many who have been previously ignored or degraded, and by exploring how images of disability color American values and politics through time, this work invites students, scholars, and citizens to understand the world more deeply and more capaciously." -- Martha Minow,Harvard University
"This splendid collection opens up a whole new field. Longmore and Umansky define it, explain why it is urgent for us to know about it, and provide fourteen fine examples of it, ranging all across American history, by as many authors. This is not your father's old-time medical historyit's a broader, brilliant enterprise." -- Walter Nugent,University of Notre Dame
"The essays introduce into the historical record a diverse group of people whose views and experiences have been largely excluded, challenge conventional notions of bodily integrity, and represent an important new subfield in American history from which we can expect rich and exciting innovation." * The Historian *
"Historians of medicine and technology will find this book an interesting introduction to a highly politicized and novel area of scholarship. This work should inspire research projects into more diverse and less categorized areas of disability." * Technology & Culture *
Table of Contents1 Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History 33 2"Speech Has an Extraordinary Humanizing Power": Horace Mann and the Problem of Nineteenth-Century American Deaf Education 58 3"This Unnatural and Fratricidal Strife": A Family's Negotiation of the Civil War, Deafness, and Independence 83 4"Trying to Idle": Work and Disability in The Diary of Alice James 107 5A Pupil and a Patient: Hospital-Schools in Progressive America 133 6Cold Charity: Manhood, Brotherhood, and the Transformation of Disability, 1870-1900 157 7The Outlook of The Problem and the Problem with the Outlook: Two Advocacy Journals Reinvent Blind People in Turn-of-the-Century America 187 8Reading between the Signs: Defending Deaf Culture in Early Twentieth-Century America 214 9Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare: The Politics of Disability Compensation for American Veterans of World War I 236 10Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness 268 11Martyred Mothers and Merciful Fathers: Exploring Disability and Motherhood in the Lives of Jerome Greenfield and Raymond Repouille 293
