Disability and History: A Special Issue of Radical History Review

Abstract

In 2005 the American journal, Literature and Medicine , published a special issue entitled ‘Difference and Identity’ which examined disease in relation to disabled, gendered and ethnic identities. The following year this journal, the Social History of Medicine , dedicated its ‘Focus’ section to reviews of a range of recent monographs on history and disability (19.3). The decision of Radical History Review to go down a similar path is indicative of the effervescence of this distinctive area of scholarly enquiry. The theme of disability and history shapes the entire issue. Consequently, in addition to research-based articles or ‘features’ and more discursive ‘reflections’ on the nature of disability history and theory, there are accounts of innovative teaching and public history projects that address the experiences of disabled people and substantial reviews of important new books in the field. One of the many strengths of this pioneering issue is the editors' introduction which draws on insights from contemporary disability studies to break out of the medical model and transfer the ‘analysis away from the disabled body to the conditions that produce disability: the vast web of social, political, economic, medical, and legal forces that create material and virtual barriers for individuals with physical or cognitive impairments’ (p. 4). The ‘features’ that follow pick up subjects that have traditionally occupied radical historians. Máirtín Ó Catháin, for instance, analyses the struggle of blind workers in Derry, Northern Ireland, to achieve better pay and working conditions between 1928 and 1940. Giving priority to the stories of blind activists themselves and to the local narratives often ‘subsumed’ into national studies, he shows how these protests ‘contributed exponentially to the rich heritage of street politics and radical dissent for which Derry became famous in later decades’ (p. 18). Likewise, in counterbalancing ‘the historiography of … Nazi crimes [where] disabled people necessarily appear largely as victims’ (p. 38), Carol Poore uses extracts from the writings of three activists who campaigned for disability rights during the Weimar Republic to demonstrate the dynamism of Germany's first self-advocacy organisations.