DSQ > Summer 2008, Volume 28, No.3

In 2001, historian Douglas C. Baynton observed, "Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write."2 At the time, disability history certainly resided in the margins of the profession. Even at annual meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA), a colossus of a conference featuring nearly 200 sessions each year, disability barely registered on most historians' radar.3 For example, the 2002 annual meeting featured only one session and three individual papers that addressed disability.4

Things have changed dramatically. In contrast to the 2002 AHA meeting, the 2008 annual meeting hosted nine sessions, five papers, and one poster on disability or disability-related topics; an open forum on disability; and a well-attended party sponsored by the Disability History Association (DHA), an international organization of scholars interested in disability history. The papers ranged in topic from childhood and disability in medieval Europe to twentieth century debates in the United States about the meaning of disability and its relationship to the state.5 At the open forum, members of the AHA Professional Division and the DHA solicited feedback and advice about how to make the profession and AHA meeting more accessible to historians with disabilities.

This special section takes the 2008 AHA annual meeting as its starting point. It seeks to highlight the ways that the historical profession has tackled issues of disability, both analytically and professionally. The issue features a forum on disability and the historical profession with five short articles and a small sampling of conference papers originating from the 2008 AHA conference. In the forum, scholars at various stages in their careers grapple with pressing professional and analytical questions about disability and relate their personal experiences in pushing the methodological and/or physical barriers of the profession.

Kim E. Nielsen's forum article demonstrates how disability can help us to unravel complex relationships between varied events of the past and traces the recent development of the field of disability history. From Nielsen's article, the forum moves backward in time, both literally and in subject matter, reprinting Douglas Baynton's important 2006 contribution to the AHA's magazine Perspectives, "Disability in History."6 In his piece, which helped to bring disability history to a larger audience of historians, Baynton provides valuable insights about why disability history should matter to all historians, even those who are not studying the lives and history of people with disabilities.

The forum then moves from integrating disability into historical scholarship to making history an accessible profession. Debbie Ann Doyle provides firsthand insight about the development of the AHA's Task Force on Disability and the organization's efforts, specifically those of the Professional Division, to address the needs of history professionals with disabilities. From there, Alice K. Adjunct and Sarah F. Rose share their experiences as an adjunct and on the job market, respectively. Perhaps more than any other article in this special issue, Alice K. Adjunct's piece reveals the distance we as historians and scholars still must travel to make history, and higher education more broadly, accessible to scholars and teachers with disabilities. Drawing on her recent experience searching for an academic job in history, Rose provides valuable insights not only about how the job market works but also about the problems people with disabilities might encounter along the way.

While the forum focuses on professional and methodological questions, the conference papers published in this issue show how some historians are putting the methods of disability history into practice. Though these papers represent only a small selection of the work of the more than thirty scholars who presented on disability-related topics at the 2008 annual meeting, they also demonstrate some important trends in disability history. Not surprisingly, the papers in this issue tie disability to the traditional bulwarks of social history — race, class, and gender — but they move beyond simple dichotomies of disability and race or disability and class. The authors demonstrate how contemporary notions of race, class, and disability as well as class, gender, and disability intertwined, influencing how various individuals understood these concepts and shaping the way citizens, government officials, organizations, and physicians behaved and were perceived.

James T. Downs offers a reassessment of the Reconstruction period following the American Civil War by focusing on the ways that slaves with disabilities experienced emancipation and the early years of freedom, showing that emancipation did not always equal freedom in the Reconstruction equation for slaves with disabilities. At the AHA meeting, John Williams-Searle presented a poster, "Building a Better Worker: Prosthetics and Working-Class Disability." Here, however, he contributes an article he presented at the 2008 Policy History Conference. He examines how, in the decades following the Civil War, U.S. railroaders' ideas about disability and masculinity shaped not only the rhetoric they used but also the policies that they advocated and the federal government adopted. Finally, Matthew Gambino's article explores how racism informed not only the treatments offered to black patients at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. in the early twentieth century but also the ways that physicians conceptualized various illnesses as well as what this racism meant to the African Americans who received treatment there.

Taken together, the papers in this special issue show that disability historians, and historians with disabilities, are challenging the ways that historians at large conceptualize of and do history. While there is still much historical and professional ground to cover, I hope that this issue suggests ways that disability, both as a methodology and a lived experience, can be accommodated to a greater degree within the historical profession. Disability, as a category of analysis, has much still to offer historians and the field of history. But, as Kim Nielsen warns in her article in this issue, we must take care not to lose the lives and stories of people with disabilities in our quest to show that disability has always mattered.

Endnotes

  1. This issue would not have been possible without the insights, advice, and support of many gifted scholars. I would like to thank DSQ editors Brenda Brueggemann and Scot Danforth and the wonderful historians who contributed articles to this issue. Many thanks also to Susan Burch, Susan M. Hartmann, Jessica Pliley, and Michelle Wolfe.
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  2. Douglas C. Baynton, "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History," in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, 33-57 (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 52.
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  3. "The AHA Annual Meeting," the American Historical Association Website; http://www.historians.org/annual/about.htm (accessed 17 July 2008).
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  4. Penny L. Richards to H-Disability, 12 December 2001; H-Disability archives can be accessed at http://www.h-net.org/~disabil/.
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  5. Penny Richards, "Panels, Papers, and Events of Interest to Disability Historians at the AHA 2008," The Disability History Association Newsletter 3 (Fall 2007); http://dha.osu.edu/news/aha08.html (accessed 16 July 2008).
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  6. I would like to thank the American Historical Association for granting its permission to include Douglas Baynton's 2006 Perspectives article in this issue. For the original article see, Douglas C. Baynton, "Disability in History," Perspectives 44 (November 2006): 5-7.
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