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AHA ranks disabilities studies as a new specialty in history

Embracing a recommendation of the recently formed Disability History Association, the AHA Council has added a new category to the checklist of specialties that is part of our membership form. Like African American history and women’s history, which were included in the membership taxonomy formulated in the 1970s, the history of disability is a rapidly growing field that has been embraced by a wide range of historians, including some who are themselves part of the subject they study.

In the essays that follow, three historians reflect on the subject: Douglas Baynton discusses disability as an analytic category, culturally and historically contingent, changing its meanings over time. Catherine Kudlick and Paul Longmore reflect on disability as practice, as infirmity that many of us experience and to which we all are likely to be vulnerable as we age.

Together these reflections raise challenging questions: What hidden assumptions have we made about what counts as an interesting subject of study and analysis? What hidden assumptions have we made about what is needed—besides smarts—to be a historian? What do we count as competence? Do we assess it wisely?...

We historians are lucky in our chosen work: maturity is likely to bring strength. Libraries are our laboratories; we rarely get thrown out of them when we retire or our grants run out. It is not difficult to think of many historians who have done their best work late in life; as bodies weaken, wisdom may grow.

But stop the clock at a single moment in time. At that moment, close to 20 percent of the population is being counted by the census as disabled—the figure that Kudlick and Longmore cite in their essay. But at that moment, too, every newborn baby is in need of 24-hour round-the-clock care; they cannot be left unguarded for a moment. As children get older, the need for care will slowly decrease, but it will not be gone fully until they reach 18, or more probably, 20 or, these days, 22 or 24 (think of all the college graduates who return home to live for a while). At the other end of the life course, if one is very lucky, one can reach age 60 or 65 without much need for additional care, but after that the need will increase gradually (again, if one is lucky) from needing help with lawn mowing on to the activities of daily life, throughout the next 20 years or more. At any given moment there are people who are in bed with the flu or hospitalized with ailments. Feminists are fond of emphasizing that women are a majority of the population; far more than 50 percent of the population is in need of some sort of help to get through the day.

People with disabilities are among us everywhere—in the schools and in museums, in government and other offices, and in annual meetings of our associations. Some of the disabled are visible: those who carry white canes for blindness, or sit in wheelchairs, or who hobble on crutches temporarily or permanently. Many of the disabilities are not immediately (or ever) visible to the uninformed: Deafness, the exhaustion resulting from chemotherapy. None of our institutions are inhabited by as many people with disabilities as they might be, were conditions more welcoming.

For more than 15 years, the Americans with Disabilities Act has summoned up a remarkable set of changes in the practices of daily life. Its requirements of physical accessibility have transformed the landscapes of the institutions where we work and study—and of the hotels where we hold our annual meetings. Think autoslide or power doors at entrances, wheelchair-accessible water fountains and sinks, Braille keypads in the elevators, handrails in bathtubs and showers.

All activists are hungry for their history. So it is with disability history. In turn, the new disability history will enable all of us to understand not just a social movement, but all history better. ...
Read entire article at Linda Kerber, president of the AHA, in Perspectives