Disability history exists outside of the institutions, healers, and treatments it often brings to mind. It is a history where the disabled live not just as patients or cure-seekers, but rather as people living differently in the world--and it is also a history that helps define the fundamental concepts of identity, community, citizenship, and normality.
The Oxford Handbook of Disability History is the first volume of its kind to represent this history and its global scale, from ancient Greece to British West Africa. The twenty-seven articles, written by thirty experts from across the field, capture the diversity and liveliness of this emerging scholarship. Whether discussing disability in modern Chinese cinema or on the American antebellum stage, this collection provides new and valuable insights into the rich and varied lives of the disabled across time and place.
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Introduction
Michael Rembis, Catherine J. Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen
Part I. CONCEPTS AND QUESTIONS
1. The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography
Kim E. Nielsen
2. Disability History and Greco-Roman Antiquity
C.F. Goodey and M. Lynn Rose
3. Intellectual Disability in the European Middle Ages
Irina Metzler
4. Disability in the Pre-modern Arab World
Sara Scalenghe
5. Disability and the History of Eugenics
Michael Rembis
6. Social History of Medicine and Disability History
Catherine J. Kudlick
7. Material Culture, Technology, and the Body in Disability History
Katherine Ott
8. Designing Objects and Spaces: A Modern Disability History
Bess Williamson
9. Documents, Ethics, and the Disability Historian
Penny Richards and Susan Burch
Part II. WORK
10. Disability and Work during the Industrial Revolution in Britain
Daniel Blackie
11. Disability and Work in South Asia and the United Kingdom
Jane Buckingham
12. Disability and Work in British West Africa
Jeff Grischow
13. Race, Work, and Disability in Progressive Era United States
Paul Lawrie
14. Organized Labor and Disability in Post-World War II United States
Audra Jennings
Part III. INSTITUTIONS
15. Deaf-blindness and the Institutionalization of Special Education in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Pieter Vierestraete and Ylva Söderfeldt
16. Disability and Madness in Colonial Asylum Records in Australia and New Zealand
Catharine Coleborne
17. Madness, Transnationalism, and Emotions in Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Australia and New Zealand
Angela McCarthy
18. Institutions for People with Disabilities in North America
Steven Noll
Part IV. REPRESENTATIONS
19. Picturing Disability in Eighteenth-Century England
David M. Turner
20. Disability, Race, and Gender on the United States Antebellum Stage
Jenifer L. Barclay
21. Polio and Disability in Cold War Hungary
Dora Vargha
22. Monstrous Births, Birth Defects, Unusual Anatomy, and Disability in Europe and North America
Leslie J. Reagan
23. Disability in Modern Chinese Cinema
Steven L. Riep
Part V. MOVEMENTS AND IDENTITIES
24. Transnational Interconnections in Nineteenth Century Western Deaf Communities
Joseph J. Murray
25. The Disability Rights Movement in the United States
Lindsey Patterson
26. The Rise of Gay Rights and the Disavowal of Disability in the United States
Regina Kunzel
27. Disabled Veterans and the Wounds of War
David A. Gerber
Index
