Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy

Just like the familiar triad of gender, class, and race, disability is historically constructed, and its meanings are situated in time and place. In seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century America, disability was not a term commonly deployed outside of British American legal discourse. However, diverse peoples used a plethora of words, far more than we use… Continue Reading The Language of “Disability” in the Premodern Archive

A Revolutionary War novel. A fugitive slave advertisement. Benjamin Franklin’s correspondence. Patient treatment records. The artwork of Edward Calendon Bruce. What do these materials reveal about the history of disability in early North America? How can we read disability into these sources? Where do people with seemingly exceptional bodies and minds appear, and where are… Continue Reading Stories from the Archives: Experiences of Disability in Early America