Children need to see themselves represented throughout history to understand their identities and the identities of others. If we do not teach disability history in our classrooms, we are dismissing the identities of many of the youth we serve and many of their family members. In addition, our classroom communities contain many students with disabilities. Anyone from any racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, gender, or class identity can be affected by disability, either temporarily or permanently. However, we still frequently leave out the history and narratives of the disability community. We have made progress in exposing our students to the experiences of different racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, gender, and class identities. Included are absorbing-at times horrific-narratives of blinded slaves being thrown overboard and women being involuntarily sterilized, as well as triumphant accounts of disabled miners organizing strikes and disability rights activists picketing Washington.Įngrossing and profound, A Disability History of the United States fundamentally reinterprets how we view our nation’s past: from a stifling master narrative to a shared history that encompasses us all.īeacon Press’s ReVisioning History series consists of accessibly written books by notable scholars that reconstruct and reinterpret US history from diverse perspectives.Our social studies and history curricula are amplifying a diversity of voices more and more over time. Throughout the book, Nielsen deftly illustrates how concepts of disability have deeply shaped the American experience-from deciding who was allowed to immigrate to establishing labor laws and justifying slavery and gender discrimination. As historian and disability scholar Nielsen argues, to understand disability history isn’t to narrowly focus on a series of individual triumphs but rather to examine mass movements and pivotal daily events through the lens of varied experiences.
By doing so, the book casts new light on familiar stories, such as slavery and immigration, while breaking ground about the ties between nativism and oralism in the late nineteenth century and the role of ableism in the development of democracy.Ī Disability History of the United States pulls from primary-source documents and social histories to retell US history through the eyes, words, and impressions of the people who lived it. In other ways, it is a radical repositioning of US history.
Covering the entirety of US history from pre-1492 to the present, A Disability History of the United States is the first book to place the experiences of disabled people at the center of the American narrative.
The first book to cover the entirety of disability history, from pre-1492 to the presentĭisability is not only the story of someone we love or the story of whom we may become rather it is undoubtedly the story of our nation.
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