As the first broad survey of its topic and the first work to lay out a complete periodization of American disability history, Kim Nielsen's A Disability History of the United States marks a milestone for the field. Going beyond the usual expectations for a survey text, this book makes a significant scholarly contribution, especially in its opening chapters on early American disability history. Its compelling prose and clear arguments also make it an excellent resource for students and general readers seeking to understand how disability in America has changed over time and the important role disability has played in US history.
The book's first chapter is one of its most effective, which is surprising given the difficulty of writing about the pre-Columbian era. Most historians struggle with pre-Columbian America because its oral Indian cultures have left few written sources. However, Nielsen seizes upon a few stories from different tribes and focuses on how Indian peoples thought about disability. She describes how some Native Americans understood disability in relational terms, such as someone having weak community relationships, instead of conceptualizing disability in bodily terms (3). She also focuses on how "indigenous nations had little or no concept of mental illness prior to European contact, only the recognition of unhealthy imbalance" (5). Nielsen effectively uses these unfamiliar views to help readers denaturalize their own understandings of disability and begin exploring the historical contingency of disability.
With a Native American understanding of disability as the backdrop, the next two chapters focus on how European colonization brought a radically different perspective to North America. Nielsen discusses physical disability, but then explains how colonists were more preoccupied with cognitive and psychological disabilities, which led to the early development of institutionalization. In these chapters and throughout the book, Nielsen takes an intersectional approach, focusing frequently on how race, class, and gender affected issues of disability. Although there are times when efforts to address intersectionality seem less integrated, such as at the end of chapter two where the discussions of Indians and slaves sit apart from the arguments of the first part of the chapter, more often Nielsen makes intersectionality integral to her narrative. For example, in the early colonial period she talks about how wealth and poverty created different outcomes for people deemed lunatics or idiots, and how negative notions of disability were used selectively against women who overstepped their proscribed gender roles. In a later chapter about the mid-twentieth century she also successfully focuses on how race played a central role in the way people experienced polio.
The chapters covering the era after the Revolution focus heavily on how concerns about citizenship affected the views and treatment of disabled people. With a new form of government that relied on participation by a competent citizenry, those deemed mentally incapable of becoming good citizens became threats to the nation. As Nielsen explains, "Inherent to the creation of the United States was the legal and ideological delineation of those who embodied ableness and thus full citizenship, as apart from those whose bodies and minds were considered deficient and defective" (50). Citizenship became a powerful concept used to oppress psychologically and cognitively disabled Americans, so much so that by the twentieth century forced sterilization laws were promoted as patriotic. In addition to focusing on concerns about citizenship and eugenics, the chapters covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focus on the Civil War veterans' pensions, institutionalization, and the negative impact that industrialization had on disabled people, making paid labor and disability increasingly antithetical.
The quality of the chapters covering the modern era is excellent, and people unfamiliar with disability history may find this part of the book even more compelling than the early chapters. This is because most of US disability historiography focuses on the period since the late nineteenth century, which gives Nielsen better source material to utilize. However, while she does an excellent job synthesizing modern disability history, disability historians will, understandably, find these chapters more familiar and less groundbreaking than early parts of the book.
In the last two chapters, Nielsen turns toward the topic of civil rights and challenges those who still think of the disability civil rights movement as suddenly beginning in the 1960s and 70s. She draws upon the work of disability historians that details the origins of the long civil rights era going back to the late 1920s. She frames the 1930s as a period when "the activism of people with disabilities and the federal policy changes generated in response to the Great Depression created new opportunities for people with disabilities" (131). From then until the late 1960s disabled people laid the groundwork and developed the cross-disability alliances that would be essential to later activists. The final chapter then culminates in the better known and more visible civil rights efforts that have occurred since 1968.
Being the first broad survey of its topic is enough to qualify this book as a significant step forward for disability history. Survey texts are vital for advancing newer subfields because they lay out a broader framework for understanding a topic and make it easier for teachers to bring a new subject into the curriculum. Indeed, I am now using this book in my own undergraduate disability history course and students have responded favorably. They enjoy the compelling narrative and better understand the broader trends of disability history that are harder to piece together when only using narrowly-focused articles and monographs. Due to the quality of the prose and the author's use of primary sources to offer powerful illustrations, all readers will find the text accessible and compelling. The brevity of this book also leaves one with few excuses not to read it.
Specialists within the field will also appreciate that this book establishes the first full periodization for all of American disability history. Although disability historians had already divided the modern era into distinct periods defined by themes such as the impact of industrialization or civil rights activism, some of the periodization Nielsen proposes for early American history is new. At the very least this should pique the interest of historians and hopefully draw more scholars to research early American disability history.
Nielsen's book stands above most history survey texts. While it certainly is not without precedent for such a book to have a scholarly impact—a survey of nineteenth-century Western US history that recently won the Bancroft Prize comes to mind—it is also not common. In addition, even though survey texts from more developed subfields are often more detailed, few are as well written. In short, this first survey of American disability history has much to offer to a variety of readers. While undergraduates and general audiences will find the book compelling due to its excellent prose and its clear and concise outline of American disability history, it also gives disability historians a new framework for understanding early American history.
