Category: Experiences of Disability in Early America

How does one express a disability? This is a pressing question for scholars studying the lives of disabled people in the archives of early America. This question becomes even more complicated when considering those with less legible invisible disabilities (see e.g., Klages 1999 and Daen 2017). In the nineteenth century, some disabilities were nebulously categorized… Continue Reading Expressing Invisible Disabilities in Antebellum Reform Movements

Scholars have long characterized nineteenth-century American asylums as places of control and coercion, as institutions where doctors, nurses, and administrators surveilled, experimented on, and otherwise abused patients, particularly women, recent immigrants, and people of color. Scholarship has focused predominantly on the asylum staff and bureaucratic processes within the state that were relevant to asylum development… Continue Reading The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum as a Site of Patient Agency