Disability in US History

People with diverse bodies and minds have existed since the origins of human habitation in what is now the United States, but how that diversity has been understood has changed dramatically over time and across cultures. This chapter begins by surveying experiences and understandings of disability in Indigenous communities and colonial America, emphasizing how different cultures made sense of human variation in dramatically different ways. Indigenous peoples often interpreted bodies and minds through individuals’ relationships with the larger community and the spiritual world, while early settlers established legal structures that sought ostensibly to protect but also effectively marginalized certain classes of people. This chapter then moves to examine disability’s intersections with race and slavery, as well as the power and influence of industrial capitalism and medical authority. Attitudes toward disability shaped and were shaped by other forms of discrimination, as well as concerns about economic expediency, and medical experts and the state were increasingly inclined to intervene in the lives of people with disabilities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But disability, importantly, has also been reconstituted and redefined through disabled people’s efforts to claim what they have been denied or to build alternative communities and futures for themselves, asserting rights and resisting ableism. Disability history is a powerful tool for illuminating structures and discourses of power, identity, and discrimination in US history writ large, and its ability to demonstrate contingency and change over time helpfully de-essentializes understandings of how people experience differences of mind, body, or senses.