Before disability: a history of American citizenship

"A literary, legal, and cultural history of disability, race, and citizenship between the Revolution and the Civil War. The history of disability rights is often told as a recent one, but it is not. In the wake of the American Revolution, many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship--and for some even exemplified its promises. By the antebellum period, however, disability was becoming a powerful, racialized tool of civic exclusion and, by the century's end, a target for eugenic elimination. In Before Disability, Sari Altschuler tells the story of how this dramatic transformation occurred. Before Disability is a literary, legal, and cultural history of the relationship between disability, race, and citizenship. It shows how disability helped to shape US citizenship and, in turn, how the formation of US citizenship shaped disability. There were two key drivers of the transformation from accommodation to exclusion and eugenics: the difficulty aligning the reality with the rhetoric of civic inclusion and the co-opting of mental and physical difference as evidence in debates about Black citizenship.