Synopses & Reviews
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Introduction.
"Historians of medicine and technology will find this book an interesting introduction to a highly politicized and novel area of scholarship. This work should inspire research projects into more diverse and less categorized areas of disability."
TechnologyandCulture
"With this work, Longmore and Umansky offer historians, sociologists and other readers intrigued by this area of scholarship an opportunity to understand disabilities as broader and more complex than a single, generic and primarily medical category."
Publishers Weekly
"The essays introduce into the historical record a diverse group of people whose views and experiences have been largely excluded, challenge conventional notions of bodily integrity, and represent an important new subfield in American history from which we can expect rich and exciting innovation."
The Historian
"The fifteen essays contained in it are thorough, wide-ranging and convincing in their interpretations. . . . This is a powerful contribution to the emancipatory efforts of disabled activists and one that historians should seek to encourage. For this, Longmore and Umansky's collection should be strongly commended."
Journal of American Studies
"The New Disability History: American Perspectives is a truly groundbreaking volume and is well-deserving of the praise heaped on its back cover."
H-Net Reviews
The essays show us that disability has a place in various parts of our history. While there is an enormous diversity of disability, the collection of essays reminds us of how comparable social perils recur across various disability groups and throughout their particular histories."
Metapsychology
Disability has always been a preoccupation of American society and culture. From antebellum debates about qualification for citizenship to current controversies over access and reasonable accommodations, disability has been present, in penumbra if not in print, on virtually every page of American history. Yet historians have only recently begun the deep excavation necessary to retrieve lives shrouded in religious, then medical, and always deep-seated cultural, misunderstanding.
This volume opens up disability's hidden history. In these pages, a North Carolina Youth finds his identity as a deaf Southerner challenged in Civil War-era New York. Deaf community leaders ardently defend sign language in early 20th century America. The mythic Helen Keller and the long-forgotten American Blind People's higher Education and General Improvement Association each struggle to shape public and private roles for blind Americans. White and black disabled World War I and II veterans contest public policies and cultural values to claim their citizenship rights. Neurasthenic Alice James and injured turn-of-the-century railroadmen grapple with the interplay of disability and gender. Progressive-era rehabilitationists fashion programs to make crippled children economically productive and socially valid, and two Depression-era fathers murder their sons as public opinion blames the boys' mothers for having cherished the lads' lives. These and many other figures lead readers through hospital-schools, courtrooms, advocacy journals, and beyond to discover disability's past.
Coupling empirical evidence with the interdisciplinary tools and insights of disability studies, the book explores the complex meanings of disability as identity and cultural signifier in American history.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Disability History: From the Margins to the Mainstream
Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky
Part I: Uses and Contests
1 Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History
Douglas C. Baynton
2 "Speech Has an Extraordinary Humanizing Power":Horace Mann and the Problem of Nineteenth-Century American Deaf Education
R. A. R. Edwards
3 "This Unnatural and Fratricidal Strife": A Family'sNegotiation of the Civil War, Deafness, and Independence
Hannah Joyner
4 "Trying to Idle": Work and Disability in The Diary of Alice James
Natalie A. Dykstra
Part II: Redefinitions and Resistance
5 A Pupil and a Patient: Hospital-Schools in Progressive America
Brad Byrom
6 Cold Charity: Manhood, Brotherhood, and the Transformation of Disability, 1870-1900
John Williams-Searle
7 The Outlook of The Problem and the Problem with the Outlook: Two Advocacy Journals Reinvent Blind People in Turn-of-the-Century America
Catherine J. Kudlick
8 Reading between the Signs: Defending Deaf Culture in Early Twentieth-Century America
Susan Burch
9 Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare: The Politics of Disability Compensation for American Veterans of World War I
K. Walter Hickel
10 Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness
Kim Nielsen
Part III: Images and Identities
11 Martyred Mothers and Merciful Fathers: Exploring Disability and Motherhood in the Lives of Jerome Greenfield and Raymond Repouille
Janice A. Brockley
12 Blind and Enlightened: The Contested Origins of the Egalitarian Politics of the Blinded Veterans Association
David A. Gerber
13 Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography
Rosemarie Garland Thomson
14 American Disability Policy in the Twentieth Century
Richard K. Scotch
Contributors
Index
Review
"This splendid collection opens up a whole new field. Longmore and Umansky define it, explain why it is urgent for us to know about it, and provide fourteen fine examples of it, ranging all across American history, by as many authors. This is not your father's old-time medical history—it's a broader, brilliant enterprise."-Walter Nugent,University of Notre Dame
Review
"The essays introduce into the historical record a diverse group of people whose views and experiences have been largely excluded, challenge conventional notions of bodily integrity, and represent an important new subfield in American history from which we can expect rich and exciting innovation."-The Historian,
Review
"Historians of medicine and technology will find this book an interesting introduction to a highly politicized and novel area of scholarship. This work should inspire research projects into more diverse and less categorized areas of disability." -Technology and Culture,
Review
"With this work, Longmore and Umansky offer historians, sociologists and other readers intrigued by this area of scholarship an opportunity to understand disabilities as broader and more complex than a single, generic and primarily medical category."-Publishers Weekly,
Review
"This splendid collection opens up a whole new field. Longmore and Umansky define it, explain why it is urgent for us to know about it, and provide fourteen fine examples of it, ranging all across American history, by as many authors. This is not your father's old-time medical history—it's a broader, brilliant enterprise."
"A cause for celebration. The insights popping off of each page are rich, compelling, and memorable. Taken together, these essays hold as much promise for remaking general understanding of the American past as pathbreaking works in women's history and African-American history. By bringing to center stage the experiences of so many who have been previously ignored or degraded, and by exploring how images of disability color American values and politics through time, this work invites students, scholars, and citizens to understand the world more deeply and more capaciously."
"Historians of medicine and technology will find this book an interesting introduction to a highly politicized and novel area of scholarship. This work should inspire research projects into more diverse and less categorized areas of disability."
"With this work, Longmore and Umansky offer historians, sociologists and other readers intrigued by this area of scholarship an opportunity to understand disabilities as broader and more complex than a single, generic and primarily medical category."
"The essays introduce into the historical record a diverse group of people whose views and experiences have been largely excluded, challenge conventional notions of bodily integrity, and represent an important new subfield in American history from which we can expect rich and exciting innovation."
Review
"A cause for celebration. The insights popping off of each page are rich, compelling, and memorable. Taken together, these essays hold as much promise for remaking general understanding of the American past as pathbreaking works in women's history and African-American history. By bringing to center stage the experiences of so many who have been previously ignored or degraded, and by exploring how images of disability color American values and politics through time, this work invites students, scholars, and citizens to understand the world more deeply and more capaciously."-Martha Minow,Harvard University
Review
"This is a provocative but an engaging book that argues that the impact of 'modern medicines' in reducing the burden of mental illness, most particularly schizophrenia and other psychoses, has been exagerated by advocates of biological psychiatry and the potential role of psychological therapies underutilised. . . The book is scholoarly and well researched yet readable."-Phillipa Hay,Metascience
Review
“Doctoring the Mind is a very accessible and well-organized book, but what makes it most engaging is the glimpse inside the world of mental illness that Bentalls patient stories provide.”
-Scientific American Mind Magazine,
Review
“This controversial book makes an important contribution to the broader health-care debate regarding mental health and the role of the pharmaceutical industry.”
-Publishers Weekly,
Review
“Bentalls are revolutionary ideas, aimed at a profession in thrall to the products of the collective of companies known as Big Pharma.”
-The Sunday Times,
Review
“Psychoanalysis was popularly called the talking cure, but a better name is the listening one, because to be listened to properly inspires, or can inspire, hope. As Bentall starkly says: ‘Without hope, the struggle for survival seems pointless. At a time when dialogue in the presence of other human beings is becoming less and less available, this brave book gives a sense of why this could be disastrous.”
-The Observer,
Synopsis
A collected volume highlighting disability's hidden history in American society
Disability has always been a preoccupation of American society and culture. From antebellum debates about qualification for citizenship to current controversies over access and reasonable accommodations, disability has been present, in penumbra if not in print, on virtually every page of American history. Yet historians have only recently begun the deep excavation necessary to retrieve lives shrouded in religious, then medical, and always deep-seated cultural, misunderstanding.
This volume opens up disability's hidden history. In these pages, a North Carolina Youth finds his identity as a deaf Southerner challenged in Civil War-era New York. Deaf community leaders ardently defend sign language in early 20th century America. The mythic Helen Keller and the long-forgotten American Blind People's higher Education and General Improvement Association each struggle to shape public and private roles for blind Americans. White and black disabled World War I and II veterans contest public policies and cultural values to claim their citizenship rights.
Neurasthenic Alice James and injured turn-of-the-century railroadmen grapple with the interplay of disability and gender. Progressive-era rehabilitationists fashion programs to make crippled children economically productive and socially valid, and two Depression-era fathers murder their sons as public opinion blames the boys' mothers for having cherished the lads' lives. These and many other figures lead readers through hospital-schools, courtrooms, advocacy journals, and beyond to discover disability's past.
Coupling empirical evidence with the interdisciplinary tools and insights of disability studies, the book explores the complex meanings of disability as identity and cultural signifier in American history.
Synopsis
Disability has always been a preoccupation of American society and culture. From antebellum debates about qualification for citizenship to current controversies over access and
reasonable accommodations, disability has been present, in penumbra if not in print, on virtually every page of American history. Yet historians have only recently begun the deep excavation necessary to retrieve lives shrouded in religious, then medical, and always deep-seated cultural, misunderstanding.
This volume opens up disability's hidden history. In these pages, a North Carolina Youth finds his identity as a deaf Southerner challenged in Civil War-era New York. Deaf community leaders ardently defend sign language in early 20th century America. The mythic Helen Keller and the long-forgotten American Blind People's higher Education and General Improvement Association each struggle to shape public and private roles for blind Americans. White and black disabled World War I and II veterans contest public policies and cultural values to claim their citizenship rights. Neurasthenic Alice James and injured turn-of-the-century railroadmen grapple with the interplay of disability and gender. Progressive-era rehabilitationists fashion programs to make crippled children economically productive and socially valid, and two Depression-era fathers murder their sons as public opinion blames the boys' mothers for having cherished the lads' lives. These and many other figures lead readers through hospital-schools, courtrooms, advocacy journals, and beyond to discover disability's past.
Coupling empirical evidence with the interdisciplinary tools and insights of disability studies, the book explores the complex meanings of disability as identity and cultural signifier in American history.
Table of Contents
Synopsis
Disability has always been a preoccupation of American society and culture. From antebellum debates about qualification for citizenship to current controversies over access and reasonable accommodations, disability has been present, in penumbra if not in print, on virtually every page of American history. Yet historians have only recently begun the deep excavation necessary to retrieve lives shrouded in religious, then medical, and always deep-seated cultural, misunderstanding.
This volume opens up disability's hidden history. In these pages, a North Carolina Youth finds his identity as a deaf Southerner challenged in Civil War-era New York. Deaf community leaders ardently defend sign language in early 20th century America. The mythic Helen Keller and the long-forgotten American Blind People's higher Education and General Improvement Association each struggle to shape public and private roles for blind Americans. White and black disabled World War I and II veterans contest public policies and cultural values to claim their citizenship rights. Neurasthenic Alice James and injured turn-of-the-century railroadmen grapple with the interplay of disability and gender. Progressive-era rehabilitationists fashion programs to make crippled children economically productive and socially valid, and two Depression-era fathers murder their sons as public opinion blames the boys' mothers for having cherished the lads' lives. These and many other figures lead readers through hospital-schools, courtrooms, advocacy journals, and beyond to discover disability's past.
Coupling empirical evidence with the interdisciplinary tools and insights of disability studies, the book explores the complex meanings of disability as identity and cultural signifier in American history.
Table of Contents
Synopsis
Toward the end of the twentieth century, the solution to mental illness seemed to be found. It lay in biological solutions, focusing on mental illness as a problem of the brain, to be managed or improved through drugs. We entered the "Prozac Age" and believed we had moved far beyond the time of frontal lobotomies to an age of good and successful mental healthcare. Biological psychiatry had triumphed.
Except maybe it hadn't. Starting with surprising evidence from the World Health Organization that suggests that people recover better from mental illness in a developing country than in the first world, Doctoring the Mind asks the question: how good are our mental healthcare services, really? Richard P. Bentall picks apart the science that underlies our current psychiatric practice. He puts the patient back at the heart of treatment for mental illness, making the case that a good relationship between patients and their doctors is the most important indicator of whether someone will recover.
Arguing passionately for a future of mental health treatment that focuses as much on patients as individuals as on the brain itself, this is a book set to redefine our understanding of the treatment of madness in the twenty-first century.
About the Author
Richard P. Bentall is professor of clinical psychology at the University of Bangor in Wales. He has held chairs in clinical psychology at the universities of Liverpool and Manchester. Known internationally for his research into the causes and treatment of severe mental illness, he is also the author of the award-winning book Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature.