Big Day for Disability History

Two big projects in US disability history are launching into the world today:

Today's the release date of Kim Nielsen's A Disability History of the United States (Beacon Press 2012), a concise (272 pages!), inexpensive (just $16 in hardcover!), and sweeping account, starting before 1492, and landing in the present-day.  If this is exactly the book you've needed for a class, for a book group, for your own study, you're not alone.   I've only been reading in disability history for seventeen years, but back in the 1990s, you'd be lucky to find a text that even acknowledged the existence of disability before Samuel Gridley Howe's 1848 report to the Massachusetts legislature.  (All my graduate projects had colonial and Early Republic settings, so I noticed.)  So for that aspect alone, let alone all the other goodness involved, I'm thrilled to greet this book.

Also--DVR alert--start popping the popcorn and dimming the lights!  Tonight is the first night of Turner Classic Movies' month-long feature, "The Projected Image:  A History of Disability in Film."   More than twenty films, various eras and genres, all with disability themes, airing all five Tuesdays in October.  Lawrence Carter-Long will co-host the series with Ben Mankiewicz.  Tonight's lineup:  An Affair to Remember (1957);  Patch of Blue (1965); Butterflies are Free (1972), Gaby-A True Story (1987), and The Sign of the Ram (1948).  All with closed captions, all with audio description.  It's a big deal that a cable network is devoting this much time to disability history and culture, and to make it accessible too; if you don't get TCM, consider calling your cable company and just subscribing for October.  That'll be great for you (20+ movies on disability themes, plus the rest of their lineup), and it'll send a signal that this kind of programming is appreciated. 

Also, if anyone wants to see a discussion feature here on DSTU, for either Kim Nielsen's book, or the TCM Film Series, I'm game.  Just holler in comments, and I'll be glad to set that up.  Otherwise, the hashtag for twitter discussions of the film series is #ProjectedImageTCM, and TCM has its own discussion boards that are certainly available for the purpose.

ETA:  Here's a podcast interview with Kim Nielsen about the new book.  

The Encyclopedia of American Disability History

[Image description: Three volumes of the Encyclopedia of American Disability History, overlapping each other, on a table]

Just realized I hadn't posted about this here yet--the Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts-on-File 2009) is now out, for real, in print. And it's heavy, too. If you're a longtime reader here, you may notice that several entries seem eerily familiar; that's because they started as blog posts right here at DS,TU. I wrote about 25 entries in the encyclopedia, and compiled the "common quotes" feature, and a lot of recent dates for the timeline (again, by looking through the DS,TU archives!).

OAH Magazine of History 23(3)(July 2009)

[Visual description: cover of the Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, featuring a sepia-toned photo of an African-American man in uniform, crutches at his side, displaying the site of his leg amputation]

The current issue of the OAH Magazine of History (Vol 23, no. 3 , July 2009) is devoted to Disability History. Here's the Table of Contents:

FOREWORD
Teaching Disability History
Daniel J. Wilson

ARTICLES
Making Disability an Essential Part of American History
Paul K. Longmore

"Nothing About Us Without Us": Disability Rights in America
Richard K. Scotch

Creating Group Identity: Disabled Veterans and American Government
David Gerber

(Extraordinary) Bodies of Knowledge: Recent Scholarship in American
Disability History
Full Bibliography
Susan Burch

TEACHING RESOURCES
"No Defectives Need Apply": Disability and Immigration
Daniel J. Wilson

Using Biography to Teach Disability History
Kim E. Nielsen

WEB RESOURCES
Disability History Online
Penny L. Richards

Only the introduction, the full bibliography of Susan Burch's article, and my article are available open-access online--click the links at the link for the issue, above--the rest, however, are well worth tracking down in hard copy at your local university library (apparently individual copies of the magazine can also be ordered).

Does the cover illustration look familiar? If you're a longtime DS,TU reader, it should--we had a post about that photo in January 2008, and I suggested it for my article. I guess they liked it enough to promote it to the cover.

Sue Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public

Sue Schweik's long-awaited book, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public is now available as part of the History of Disability series from NYU Press. For much of the twentieth century, there were local laws in many American cities that allowed police to remove unsightly individuals from public view. The Chicago wording is most famous: "Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed... shall not... expose himself to public view."

Yes, really.

Sue's touring with this book--so if the description piques your interest and you can attend one of these appearances, go check them out.

San Francisco: Tuesday July 14 (With "Tiny" Garcia of Poor Magazine,
Leroy Moore, Coalition on Homelessness and the Po' Poets): Modern Times
Bookstore, 888 Valencia St, 7 pm. Focus on connections to continuing
criminalization of poverty today.

Cleveland: Sunday July 26: Barnes and Noble Eton Collection, 28801 Chagrin
Blvd, Woodmere, 2 pm. Focus on Cleveland and Ohio disability history.

Chicago: Tuesday July 28: Access Living, 115 W. Chicago, 6-8:30 pm. RSVP
to Riva, 312-640-1919, rlehrer@accessliving.org. Focus on poor disabled
peoples' resistance to the laws.

Chicago: Wednesday July 29: Women and Children First bookstore, 5233 North
Clark Street, 7:30 pm. Focus on connections betwen the policing of
disability and the policing of gender in the laws.

News of the Day: Amazonfail and BADD 2009

Does the "Amazonfail" story affect disability studies books too? Oh yes it does!

Will there be a Blogging Against Disablism Day 2009? Oh yes there will!

RIP: Nancy Eiesland (1964-2009)

[Image: a black-and-white portrait of Nancy Eiesland, from her faculty webpage]

Sad news: Nancy Eiesland of Emory University has died this week, from cancer. If you're interested in how disability studies scholarship might inform the sociology of religion, you won't get far without running into some of Nancy Eiesland's work, especially The Disabled God (Abingdon Press 1994) and Human Disability and the Service of God (an edited collection, Abingdon Press 1998).

Eiesland wrote last year in a campus publication about her lifelong experiences with surgeries and pain and medication, noting "for most of us, pain will be an ordinary partner in an ordinary life." Her colleague and friend Christian Scharen has this remembrance. According to the Facebook group "Friends of Nancy Eiesland," a memorial service is being planned for the afternoon of March 22, in Cannon Chapel on campus.

Back from the Disability History Conference

Spent last week on a combination family vacation and conference trip, to the Disability History Conference at SFSU. It was a good conference, small, no book display or anything, just two sessions running concurrently, probably 50-100 people? (I'm bad at guessing such numbers.) I was on two panels, one for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts on File 2009), and one for my project about Marion Brown (1843-1915), with Iain Hutchison (more on that here). Iain brought me a wonderful gift: The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press 2007). It has an entry on Marion Brown in it (written by Iain), but it has loads of other great stories, and if you're a longtime reader of DS,TU, you know I'm already scanning it for post subjects. Better than popcorn.

One example, for starters: Christian Gray (1772-c1830) was a farmers' daughter from near Perth, who became blind when she survived smallpox as a little child. She was read to, daily, for her education; in time, she began composing poetry, and her first volume of poems was published in 1808. She pointed to Milton and Ossian as her predecessors, and wrote poems about being blind (I can't find any of those verses online yet, though).

July 14: Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)

[Image description: Woody Guthrie, guitar in hands; guitar displays a sign that reads "This Machine Kills Fascists"]

"The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine." --Woody Guthrie

Legendary American folk singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie was born on this date 96 years ago, in Okemah, Oklahoma. At age 52, he was picked up for vagrancy in New Jersey, and alcoholism or schizophrenia were suspected as underlying causes of his increasing erratic behavior and health changes. But at the Greystone Psychiatric Hospital he was instead diagnosed with Huntington's Chorea (now known as Huntington's Disease)--an incurable degenerative neurological condition. He died thirteen years later, at a state hospital in Queens, NY. Guthrie's ex-wife went on to work with other affected families on securing funding for research into HD.

This birthday gives me an opportunity to mention Alice Wexler's new book: The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington's and the Making of a Genetic Disease (Yale University Press, available September 2008) takes the story of Huntington's in America back long before Woody Guthrie, to the early 19th century, to the communities on Long Island where HD was a familiar reality in many leading local families. She follows the story of the disease through generations, through the eugenics era (where HD's strong genetic pattern made it an obvious subject of study), and into the present of genetic technology.

Book Tour: Cripple Poetics by Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus

Homofactus Press has us on their blog book tour schedule (and apparently CripChick and Wheelchair Dancer are also stops on the tour). The book they've sent us information about this time is Cripple Poetics by Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus (photos by Lisa Steichmann), which they describe as "by turns playful, unsettling, raw, and moving...an immersive and sensual correspondence that builds and heats by accretion--one keystroke at a time." Kuppers and Marcus are each, individually, respected performance artists in the field of disability studies. If that sounds like your bag, check it out when it's released this summer--or check out some excerpts here. New to the idea of "crip poetry"? Check out Jim Ferris's "Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love the Limp" essay, here.

Petra Kuppers was my roommate at the first Society for Disability Studies conference I ever attended, in 1999, which was also where I first met Mike Dorn. (Petra laughed because I bundle up to sleep, socks and all. You might guess from her work that she's not so much for the bundling.) Whenever you think, wow, it would be so cool if someone could combine this topic and that topic and do something provocative with all the intersections and overlaps and contradictions--well, Petra's one of the people who can do such things, and does them beautifully.

Shameless plug

[Image description: Inside a green circle, there's a picture of two blond children outdoors at a playground; the foreground child is in a wheelchair, with both arms in the air, smiling]

Got the new Landscape Structures catalog today, and there's a picture of my kids on page 40 (shown at left)--part of a spread describing a nearby accessible playground, in Playa Vista. We went to the photo shoot (basically a playdate with cameras) last summer, but I never knew what happened to the pics until now.

Landscape Structures is a Minnesota-based playground equipment company, that specializes in fun, innovative, safe, accessible, durable, and green designs. Until recently, they were one of the largest woman-run companies in Minnesota, too. (Co-founder and president Barbara King died in March.)

CFP: Nineteenth-Century UK, Gender and Disability

Another cool call for papers:

CALL FOR PAPERS
NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES
SUMMER 2008
SUBMISSION DATE: March 1, 2008

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is a peer-reviewed, online journal committed to publishing insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century British literature, art and culture. The journal is a collaborative effort that brings together advanced graduate students and scholars from a variety of universities to create a unique voice in the field. We endorse a broad definition of gender studies and welcome submissions that consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with race, class, place and nationality.

NCGS is preparing to launch a special guest-edited issue in Summer 2008 that would read nineteenth-century texts within a disability studies/queer studies/gender studies framework. The issue will engage and answer these and other questions: how do issues of the disabled body and the gendered body parallel each other, or collapse into one another? What are the implications of disability in the construction and practice of femininity in nineteenth-century culture? What are the implications of disability in the construction and practice of masculinity in nineteenth-century culture? How do images and metaphors of physical difference work, with gender, into the forms of nineteenth-century literature and culture? What are the connections between gender, ability/disability, and work in the nineteenth century? What are the theoretical implications of prosthetics in writing/understanding nineteenth-century culture? What are the implications of bodily performance in general in the nineteenth century? Is gender transformation also one of the potentialities we might find in Victorian lit/cultural artifacts on disability? What is the significance, in the investigation of nineteenth-century texts, of queering disability and disability studies? How are both same-gender and heterosexual relationships catalyzed by disability in nineteenth-century plot structures? How are identities of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality connected? How do certain texts in the nineteenth century attempt to transform systems of embodiment?

Please submit essays by March 1 to either

Mark Mossman, Associate Professor
English Department
Western Illinois University
Macomb, IL 61455
USA
or,

Martha Stoddard-Holmes, Associate Professor
Department of Literature and Writing Studies
California State University-San Marcos
San Marcos, CA 92096
USA

Only electronic submissions will be considered.

New book: Kenny Fries, "The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory"

(Wow, I didn't think I'd get that whole title into the space allowed.)

Time to crank up my Amazon wishlist--according to the press release:

Kenny Fries tells two stories: the development of the theory of 'survival of the fittest,' as articulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, and the history of his ever-changing, made-to-order, orthopedic shoes....Although only the 'fittest' may survive, Fries learns that adaptation and variation are critical to survival. What is deemed normal, or even perfect, are passing phases of the ever-changing embodiment of nature in our world.

Kinda puts a whole new spin on going to the orthotist for a "fitting," eh?

New Memoir: Anne Finger, "Elegy for a Disease"

While polio is a physical experience, it is also a social one…. Polio does not belong just to those of us who were infected by it, but to our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers, our partners and our children; to those who cared for us, to those who brutalized us (often not mutually exclusive categories); to those who saw us as palimpsests [tablets] on which to write their fear, their pity, their admiration, their empathy, their discomfort.

--Anne Finger, from the online version of the Smithsonian's exhibit "Whatever Happened to Polio?"

If you enjoyed Anne Finger's earlier book, Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth (Seal Press 1990), or her disability-themed novel Bone Truth (Coffeehouse Press 1994), you'll want to check out her new memoir, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (St. Martin's Press 2006), just out.

New books on Dixmont asylum, Deaf in Japan

There are two new books on disability history out just this month to note.

Karen Nakamura's Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (Cornell University Press 2006), starts from the first Japanese schools for the deaf in the 1870s, and relies on both archival and ethnographic research to reveal recent shifts in attitudes, both toward and within the deaf community. Karen Nakamura is an anthropology professor at Yale.

Mark Berton's Dixmont State Hospital (Images of America, Arcadia Publishing, 2006) is a photographic record of the title institution, an asylum on the Ohio River outside Pittsburgh; built in 1859 (and named for Dorothea Dix), it closed in 1984 and the building was razed earlier this year. Berton is a Pittsburgh-based newspaper photographer who "spends his free time photographing asylum architecture."

[Dixmont was apparently a popular site for photographers; Rowdydow has a webpage featuring images from inside its ruins, and Dixmont.info has video and many more stills. The pictures of Dixmont at the Hours of Darkness gallery give you some flavor of the place's style and state before its demolition.]