Teaching Disability History in the Contemporary United States
[Editor’s Note: Below several scholars discuss their experiences in teaching a variety of courses that introduce students to disability history. In the future, I am eager to present courses for other times and places. The DHA will also be launching a syllabus pool that will contain annotated copies of syllabi as well as any relevant discussions. Please feel free to contribute anything you feel might be useful.]
“U.S. Disability History” (Online Course for Gallaudet University)
Penny Richards, Research Scholar, UCLA turley2@earthlink.net
Because I don't spend enough time online already (ha!), I'm teaching a US disability history course, for Gallaudet University this fall. I'm attaching the schedule of readings, but what's cool about teaching online—besides the very relaxed dress code, and the fact that I can hold office hours at 5am or midnight, as I please—is the wealth of online resources so close at hand: we've been mining the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement, for example (http://www.eugenicsarchive.org).
We're half-way through the course as I type this, and so far so good, I think.
A few notes about the selection of readings: The four students who are taking this course have mostly already taken Brian Greenwald's US Deaf History course, so I didn't choose many readings that might overlap with that. I would have liked to use more articles from state historical journals, but they're less often in article databases that the library can easily link for online courses (a few we scanned from my paper copies to include). There's a bit more emphasis on the history of cognitive disability, family life, and women's histories of disability here than I've seen in some syllabi, just reflecting my own interests. And finally, I pulled a lot of these readings from the monthly bibliographies I compile for H-Disability, so keep submitting cites to that, everyone, please!
HIS 735-OL1/PST 260-OL1
Gallaudet University Fall 2007
US Disability History
Penny L. Richards
SCHEDULE OF READINGS
NOTE: NDH=New Disability History (Longmore & Umansky)—this is an assigned text, so those readings don’t need to be linked or reserved or copied
1. August 27-September 2
Introduction, overview
Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, “Introduction: Disability History: From Margins to Mainstream,” in NDH (1-29).
Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in NDH (33-57).
Elizabeth Bredberg, “Writing Disability History: Problems, Perspectives, and Sources,” Disability & Society 19(2)(1999): 189-201.
Catherine J. Kudlick, "Disability History: Why We Need Another 'Other'," American Historical Review 108(June 2003): 763-793.
2. September 3-9
Early America to 1825
Parnel Wickham, "Conceptions of Idiocy in Colonial Massachusetts," Journal of Social History 35(4)(2002): 935-954.
Lawrence B. Goodheart, "The Distinction between Witchcraft and Madness in Colonial Connecticut," History of Psychiatry 13(4)(2002): 433-444.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Derangement in the Family: The Story of Mary Sewall, 1824-25,” Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife AnnualProceedings 15(1990): 168-184.
Penny L. Richards, and George H. S. Singer, “‘To Draw Out the Effort of his Mind’: Educating a Child with Mental Retardation in the Early-Nineteenth-Century South,” Journal of Special Education 31(4) (Winter 1998): 443-466.
3. September 10-16
Mid-Nineteenth Century: Institutions
James F. Gardner, “The Era of Optimism, 1850-1870: A Preliminary Appraisal,” Mental Retardation 31(April 1993): 89-95.
David J. Rothman, “Introduction,” from The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Little Brown & Company 1971): xiii-xx.
Penny L. Richards, “’Beside Her Sat Her Idiot Child’: Families and Developmental Disability in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Steven Noll and James W. Trent, eds., Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader (NYU Press 2004): 65-86.
Myra Samuels Himelhoch and Arthur H. Shaffer, “Elizabeth Packard: Nineteenth-Century Crusader for the Rights of Mental Patients,” American Studies 13(3)(1979): 343-375.
Carla Yanni, "The Linear Plan for Insane Asylums in the United States before 1866," Journal—Society of Architectural Historians 62 (1)(2003): 24-49.
4. September 17-23
“Invalid” Women in 19c.-20c. America
Natalie Dykstra, “’Trying to Idle’: Work and Disability in The Diary of Alice James,” in NDH (107-130).
Peter McCandless. "A Female Malady? Women and the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, 1828-1915," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 54(4)(October 1999): 543-571.
Emma Dominguez-Rué, “Madwomen in the Drawing Room: Female Invalidism in Ellen Glasgow’s Gothic Stories,” Journal of American Studies 38(3)(December 2004): 425-438.
Basil Meyer. "Till Death Do Us Part: The Consumptive Victorian Heroine in Popular Romantic Fiction," Journal of Popular Culture 37(2) (2003): 287-308.
5. September 24-30
Eugenics Pt. 1: Race, Contagion, and Immigration Control
Steven Selden, "Eugenics and the Social Construction of Merit, Race, and Disability," Journal of Curriculum Studies 32(2)(March-April 2000): 235-252.
June Dwyer. "Disease, deformity, and defiance: Writing the language of immigration law and the eugenics movement on the immigrant body," MELUS 28(1)(Spring 2003): 105-121.
Howard Markel. "'The Eyes Have It': Trachoma, the Perception of Disease, the United States Public Health Service and the American Jewish Immigration Experience, 1897-1924," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74(3)(2000): 525-560.
6. October 1-7
Eugenics Pt. 2: Sexuality and Eugenic Sterilization
Stephen J. Gould, “Carrie Buck’s Daughter,” Natural History 93(July 1984): 14-18.
James W. Trent, “To Cut and Control: Institutional Preservation and the Sterilization of Mentally Retarded People in the United States, 1892-1947,” Journal of Historical Sociology 6(1993): 56-73.
Johanna Schoen. "Between Choice and Coercion: Women and the
Politics of Sterilization in North Carolina, 1929-1975," Journal of
Women's History 13(1)(Spring 2001): 132-156.
P. K. Wilson. "Harry Laughlin's Eugenic Crusade to Control the 'socially inadequate' in Progressive Era America," Patterns of Prejudice 36(1)(January 2002): 46-67.
7. October 8-14
Special Education
Brad Byrom, “A Pupil and a Patient: Hospital-Schools in Progressive America,” in NDH (133-156).
Edwin W. Martin, Reed Martin, and Donna L. Terman, “The Legislative and Litigation History of Special Education,” The Future of Children 6 (1)(Spring 1996): 25-39.
Barry Franklin, “Progressivism and Curriculum Differentiation: Special Classes in the Atlanta Public Schools, 1898-1923,” History of Education Quarterly 29(1989): 571-593.
Joseph Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1890s-1940s,” History of Education Quarterly 27(Spring 1987): 29-53.
Robert L. Osgood. "From 'Public Liabilities' to 'Public Assets': Special Education for Children with Mental Retardation in Indiana Public Schools, 1908-1931," Indiana Magazine of History 98(September 2002): 203-225.
8. October 15-21
Work, Unions, Organizing
John Williams-Searle, “Cold Charity: Manhood, Brotherhood, and the Transformation of Disability, 1870-1900,” in NDH (157-186).
Thomas A. Krainz, “Transforming the Progressive Era Welfare State: Activists for the Blind and Blind Benefits,” Journal of Policy History 15(2)(2003): 223-264.
Edward Slavishak. "Artificial Limbs and Industrial Workers' Bodies in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh," Journal of Social History 37(2) (Winter 2003): 365-388.
Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger, "The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History," Journal of American History 87(3) (December 2000): 888-922, online at: http://www.historycooperative.org/ journals/jah/87.3/
9. October 22-28
War and Disabled Veterans
K. Walter Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare: The Politics of Disability Compensation for American Veterans of World War I,” in NDH (236-267).
David A. Gerber, “Blind and Enlightened: The Contested Origins of the Egalitarian Politics of the Blinded Veterans Association,” in NDH (313-334).
Peter Blanck and Chen Song, "'Never Forget What They Did Here': Civil War Pensions for Gettysburg Union Army Veterans and Disability in Nineteenth-Century America." William and Mary Law Review 44(February 2003): 907-1520.
Beth Linker, “Feet for Fighting: Locating Disability and Social Medicine in First World War America,” Social History of Medicine 20(1) (April 2007): 91-110.
Robert F. Jefferson. "'Enabled Courage': Race, Disability, and Black World War II Veterans in Postwar America," The Historian 65(5) (2003): 1102-1124.
10. October 29-November 4
Families and post-WWII Activism
Susan Schwartzenberg, Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of Disability (University of Washington Press 2005).
Gerald O’Brien, “Rosemary Kennedy: The Importance of a Historical Footnote,” Journal of Family History 29(July 2004): 225-236.
Kathleen W. Jones, “Education for Children with Mental Retardation: Parent Activism, Public Policy, and Family Ideology in the 1950s,”in Steven Noll and James W. Trent, eds., Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader (NYU Press 2004): 322-350.
Katherine Castles, “’Nice, Average Americans: Postwar Parents’ Groups and the Defense of the Normal Family,” in Steven Noll and James W. Trent, eds., Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader (NYU Press 2004): 351-370.
Barbara Bair, “The Parents’ Council for Retarded Children and Social Change in Rhode Island, 1951-1970,” Rhode Island History 40(1981): 144-159.
James W. Trent, “The Remaking of Mental Retardation: Of War, Angels, Parents, and Politicians,” Chapter 7 in Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (University of California Press 1994): 225-268.
11. November 5-11
Disability Rights Movement/Independent Living
Mary Johnson & Barrett Shaw, eds. To Ride the Public's Buses: The Fight that Built a Movement (Advocado Press 2000).
Joseph Shapiro, “From Charity to Independent Living,” Chapter 2 in Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (Times Books 1994): 41-73.
Jacqueline Vaughan Switzer, “Social and Political Activism,” Chapter 4 in Switzer, Disabled Rights: American Disability Policy and the Fight for Equality (Georgetown University Press 2003): 68-89.
12. November 12-18
ADA
Jane West, “The Social and Policy Context of the Act,” Milbank Quarterly 69(1/2)(1991): 3-24.
William P. McCrone. "Tracking the Disability Pendulum: The First Decade of the Americans With Disabilities Act," Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 11(1)(2006): 134.
Jacqueline Vaughan Switzer, “The ADA as Policy,” Chapter 6 in Switzer, Disabled Rights: American Disability Policy and the Fight for Equality (Georgetown University Press 2003): 112-143.
Jacqueline Vaughan Switzer, “Life Beyond the ADA: Policy Hot Buttons,” Chapter 7 in Switzer, Disabled Rights: American Disability Policy and the Fight for Equality (Georgetown University Press 2003): 144-172.
13. November 19-December 2
Disability Culture
Harriet McBryde Johnson, “Art Object,” in Johnson, Too Late to Die Young (Picador 2005): 229-249.
Lennard J. Davis, “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies,” American Literary History 11(3)(Autumn 1999): 500-512.