HIST 3307 Blog for Spring 2013

Read:

1) Nielsen, The New Disability History, pp. 131-156 (all of ch. 7, for e-book users)

2) In The New Disability History: Susan Burch, “Reading between the Signs: Defending Deaf Culture in Early Twentieth-Century America,” pp. 214-235

3) Susan Schwartzenberg, Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of Disability (University of Washington Press, 2005), pp. 5-9, 18-27, 35-41, 63-65 (Blackboard)

Please answer one of the following questions:

1) With few exceptions, historically people with disabilities and their families have not seen themselves as a community or as having much in common.  Drawing on at least two of the readings for today, identify and discuss one reason you think this dynamic began to change in the mid-twentieth century.

2) Alternatively, you can summarize in several sentences (or possibly a short paragraph each) your “muddiest point(s)” in at least two pieces or across the readings.

Paper on Freaks due at 11 am today.  We will discuss FDR and disability and also watch excerpts from Warm Springs in class.

Read:

1) David Serlin, “Engineering Masculinity: Veterans and Prosthetics after World War Two” in Artificial Parts, Practical Lives, pp. 45-74 (Blackboard)

2) Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt’s Massive Disability and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1985), ch. 1-4 & 10, pp. 10-33, 88-105 (Blackboard)

Answer one of the following questions:

1) What kinds of pressures did rehabilitation ideology place on disabled veterans and FDR?  Your answer should draw on both Serlin and Gallagher and should highlight a couple of different aspects.

2) Alternatively, you can summarize in several sentences (or possibly a short paragraph each) your “muddiest point(s)” in both pieces.

Read (the readings for March 26, March 28, and April 2nd have been switched around)

1) In The New Disability History: Brad Byrom, “A Pupil and a Patient: Hospital-Schools in Progressive America,” pp. 133-156

2) Douglas C. McMurtrie, Jimmy’s Fight for Independence (pamphlet, 1910) (Blackboard)

3) In The New Disability History: K. Walter Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare: The Politics of Disability Compensation for American Veterans of World War I,” pp. 236-267

Answer one of the following questions:

1) Drawing on Byrom and Hickel, how would you characterize the goals of the rehabilitation movement?

2) Alternatively, you can summarize in several sentences (or possibly a short paragraph each) your “muddiest point(s)” in at least two articles.

Read:

1. Robert Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1996), pp. 23-37 (Blackboard)

2. David A. Gerber, “The ‘Careers’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorization,” in Freakery pp. 38-54 (Blackboard)

3. Christopher A. Vaughan, “Ogling Igorots: The Politics and Commerce of Exhibiting Cultural Otherness, 1898-1913,” in Freakery, pp. 219-233 (Blackboard)

Answer one of the following questions:

1) Summarize in several sentences (or possibly a short paragraph each) your “muddiest point(s)” in at least two of Bogdan, Gerber, and Vaughan.

2) After reading Bogdan and Gerber, do you think freak shows were a form of disability community, a viable work option for people with disabilities, simply exploitation, or something else?  Why?

Read:

1) In The New Disability History: John Williams-Searle, “Cold Charity: Manhood, Brotherhood, and the Transformation of Disability, 1870-1900,” pp. 157-186

2) In Why I Burned My Book: Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History,” pp. 53-101

Answer one of the following questions:

1) Drawing on  do you think employers turned against workers with disabilities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?  Your answer should draw on both Longmore and Williams-Searle.

2) Alternatively, you can summarize in several sentences (or possibly a short paragraph each) your “muddiest point(s)” in Williams-Searle and Longmore.

Read:

1) Stephen Mihm, “‘A Limb Which Shall Be Presentable in Polite Society’: Prosthetic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century,” in Artificial Parts, Practical Lives, pp. 282-299 (Blackboard)

2) Robert M. Buchanan, Illusions of Equality: Deaf Americans in School and Factory, 1850-1950 (Gallaudet University Press, 1999), ch. 5 (pp. 69-84) (Blackboard)

3) In The New Disability History:  Natalie A. Dykstra, “‘Trying to Idle’: Work and Disability in The Diary of Alice James,” pp. 107-132

Answer one of the following questions;

1) Drawing on at least two of the readings, discuss what it was like to be a worker with a disability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

2)  Alternatively, you can summarize in several sentences (or possibly a short paragraph each) your “muddiest point(s)” in at least two articles or a single point that draws on at least two articles.