A Disability History of the United States

Content Warning: This section discusses ableism, racism, enslavement, and mental illness. The source text’s use of outdated and offensive terms is replicated only in quotations.

In A Disability History of the United States, author Kim E. Nilsen takes an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to provide a historical analysis of disability in the United States. Drawing from her background as a professor of women’s studies and disability studies, Nielsen understands how scholarship on disability intersects with scholarship on race, gender, and class. A multidisciplinary approach allows one to understand the past from various perspectives and understand how disability was connected to larger aspects of American history. In her opening chapter, Nielsen examines disability among Indigenous peoples of pre-Columbian North America. Taking into account cultural aspects of various Indigenous nations, this examination draws primarily from the academic discipline of Native American studies but also incorporates linguistics and geography.

As Nielsen describes the formation of colonial communities after the arrival of European settlers, her examination looks at the effects and consequences of colonialism and colonization. The spread of disease and religiosity, she notes, are important parts of that history, so pathology and theology play a role in Nielsen’s analysis. The issue of slavery dominates the historical aspects of the late colonial period. Niesen shows the connection of slavery to disability in two major ways. The earliest definition of disability was the inability to labor, but in a broader sense, the inability to care for oneself also rendered one disabled. In Chapter 3, Nielsen points out that “the racist ideology of slavery held that Africans brought to North America were by definition disabled” because of their supposed mental inferiority (42). One of the most horrific aspects of the slave trade was the treatment of enslaved people with disabilities as “refuse slaves” because they failed to earn a profit for traders of enslaved people. Nielsen argues that “the poisonous combination of racism, ableism, and economic drive left slaves with disabilities extremely vulnerable” (47).

Following both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, disability became more visible. In both of these periods, understandings of disability profoundly transformed as the professionalization of medicine led to biological explanations replacing theological explanations for psychological disorders and an expansion in institutions for people with disabilities. Issues of industrialization, urbanization, and labor relations highlight the ways in which disability intersected with class in the late 19th century. Nielsen’s examination of this period also includes significant discussion about education for people with disabilities. Through the Reconstruction Era and the Gilded Age, disability became increasingly institutionalized as the solidification of the federal government, along with emerging technologies and urbanization, “aided the creation of institutions and the development of policies pertaining to people considered disabled” (98).

The Progressive Era in the United States was a period of active government and social reform. Nielsen’s examination of the early part of the 20th century once again shows the interdisciplinary nature of her work and The Intersectionality of Disability With Race, Gender, and Class. Drawing from fields of study such as genetics and immigration, she describes how concerns about the changing nature of America’s citizens and a widespread embrace of the pseudoscientific belief in eugenics led to immigration policies that restricted people based on race, class, and disability and forced sterilization laws that determined which women were allowed to reproduce. The latter half of the 20th century was a period marked by policy advancement for people with disabilities. It was also an era in which the disability rights movement intersected with and borrowed from other social movements active at the time.