table of contents - home page - text-only home page The New Disability History: American Perspectives Edited by Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky Disability has always been a preoccupation of American society and culture. From antebellum debates about qualification for citizenship to current controversies over access and reasonable accommodations, disability has been present, in penumbra if not in print, on virtually every page of American history. Yet historians have only recently begun the deep excavation necessary to retrieve lives shrouded in religious, then medical, and always deep-seated cultural, misunderstanding. This volume opens up disability's hidden history. In these pages, a North Carolina youth finds his identity as a deaf Southerner challenged in Civil War-era New York. Deaf community leaders ardently defend sign language in early 20th century America. The mythic Helen Keller and the long-forgotten American Blind People's Higher Education and General Improvement Association each struggle to shape public and private roles for blind Americans. White and black disabled World War I and II veterans contest public policies and cultural values to claim their citizenship rights. Neurasthenic Alice James and injured turn-of-the-century railroadmen grapple with the interplay of disability and gender. Progressive-era rehabilitationists fashion programs to make crippled children economically productive and socially valid, and two Depression-era fathers murder their sons as public opinion blames the boys' mothers for having cherished the lads' lives. These and many other figures lead readers through hospital-schools, courtrooms, advocacy journals, and beyond to discover disability's past. Coupling empirical evidence with the interdisciplinary tools and insights of disability studies, the book explores the complex meanings of disability as identity and cultural signifier in American history. Author of The Invention of George Washington,Paul K. Longmore is Professor of History and Director of the Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. Associate Professor of History at Suffolk University, Lauri Umansky is the author of Motherhood Reconceivedand co-editor, with Molly Ladd Taylor, of "Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth Century America. Table of Contents Introduction Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, "Disability History: From the Margins to the Mainstream" Part I: Uses and Contests Douglas C. Baynton, "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History" R. A. R. Edwards, "'Speech Has An Extraordinary Humanizing Power': Horace Mann and the Problem of Nineteenth-Century American Deaf Education" Hannah Joyner, "'This Unnatural and Fratricidal Strife': A Family's Negotiation of the Civil War, Deafness, and Independence" Natalie A. Dykstra, "'Trying to Idle': Work and Disability in The Diary of Alice James" Part II: Redefinitions and Resistance Brad Byrom, "A Pupil and A Patient: Hospital-Schools in Progressive America" John Williams-Searle, "Cold Charity: Manhood, Brotherhood, and the Transformation of Disability, 1870-1900" Catherine J. Kudlick, "The Outlook of The Problem and the Problem with The Outlook: Two Advocacy Journals Reinvent Blind People in Turn-of-the-Century America" Susan Burch, "Reading Between the Signs: Defending Deaf Culture in Early Twentieth Century America" K. Walter Hickel, "Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare: The Politics of Disability Compensation for American Veterans of World War I" Kim Nielsen, "Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness" Part III: Images and Identities Janice A. Brockley, "Martyred Mothers and Merciful Fathers: Exploring Disability and Motherhood in the Lives of Jerome Greenfield and Raymond Repouille" David A. Gerber, "Blind and Enlightened: The Contested Origins of the Egalitarian Politics of the Blinded Veterans Association" Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, "Seeing the Disabled: Visual Representations of Disabled People in Modern American Popular Culture" Richard K. Scotch, "Conceptions of Disability Policy in Twentieth Century America." Ordering information: General Interest / Pub. 12/1/2000 / 432 pages ISBN: 0814785638 / $65.00 cloth ISBN: 0814785646 / $23.95 paper New York University Press 838 Broadway, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10003-4812 tel (212) 998-2575 fax (212) 995-3833 e-mail inquiries: nyupress.feedback@nyu.edu Orders and Customer Service New York University Press 838 Broadway, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10003-4812 tel 1-800-996-6987 fax (212) 995-3833 table of contents - home page - text-only home page