I could not pronounce my k, d, and soft g sounds. “Kim” came out “Tim.” For a little girl with short hair, who enjoyed playing outside and probably got dirty sometimes, being mistaken for a boy was a huge affront. The family story is that at one point, completely fed up with people who heard me say my name as “Tim,” I almost quit talking to people. Apparently I have long been stubborn. In a rural county that had few social services and no kindergarten program, my parents turned to Easter Seals—which, around 1970, was primarily privately funded. Wherever the funding came from, my parents much appreciated the sliding fee scale.
Looking back, I’m grateful to Easter Seals—once known as the Society for Crippled Children. My gratefulness is for the respect with which they treated my parents and for the fact that, as interpreted through my four- or five-year-old brain, the entire experience was great fun. I got to throw things. That was incredibly empowering, helping me to feel at home in my voice and in my body. That should be the experience of us all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The creation of this book generated more debts than I can ever list or repay. Generations of scholars, activists, archivists, scrapbookers, and others, some well known and others not, laid the groundwork on which this book is built. People tolerated my out-of-the-blue phone calls, my repetitive e-mails, and my failures to comprehend. More than ever before, it is hard for me to disentangle the interwoven threads of the personal, the intellectual, and the professional. More than ever before, doing so is artificial. Forrest Brooks, Lisa Poupart, and David Voelker shared their wisdom. Daniel Blackie answered many e-mails. Harold and Arlene Ripple provide beautiful space on the Lake Superior shore. Katherine Ott provided hospitable lodging that helped to make research delightful. Jeff Brunner, formerly of the UWGB interlibrary loan, cheerfully accomplished the impossible. Becky Dale does her best to keep me on an even keel. Neil Marcus kindly let me use his poetry. Susan Burch, Andy Kersten, and Michael Rembis generously and adeptly commented on the entire manuscript. At Beacon Press, Gayatri Patnaik acted on her faith in me and this project. Joanna Green provided guidance, good cheer, smarts, time, and wisdom. This book is much better because of her. Both women have incredible patience.
People I know well and those new to me helped in tangible and intangible ways, all profound; with food, phone calls, poetry, love, chocolate, reassurance, care packages, hand holding, bibliographies, occasional snow-blowing, and encouragement. All make my life easier, more pleasant, and remind me of the ways in which Green Bay and the larger academic world consists of many marvelous people. I am thankful for Susan Burch, Eli Clare, Tim Dale, Jim Ferris, Dr. Tracy Gallagher, Linda Kerber, Andy Kersten, Cathy Kudlick, Paul Longmore, Kathie Nielsen, Ron Nielsen, Corbett O’Toole, Katherine Ott, Michael Rembis, Penny Richards, Walt Schalick, Caroline Sullivan, Maya Tuff, Morgan Tuff, Nathan Tuff, and Kris Vespia—so very, very thankful.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Linda K. Kerber, “Women and Individualism in American History,” Massachusetts Review 30, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 600.
2. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).
CHAPTER ONE
1. Tom Porter, And Grandma Said . . . Iroquois Teachings as Passed Down through the Oral Tradition (Philadelphia: Xlibris: 2008), 416; Oneida Dictionary, at “Oneida Language Tools,” University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, accessed May 2011, http://www.uwgb.edu/oneida.
2. Carol Locust, “Wounding the Spirit: Discrimination and Tradition in American Indian Belief Systems,” Harvard Educational Review 58, no. 3 (1988): 326. See also: Carol Locust, American Indian Concepts of Health and Unwellness (Tucson, AZ: Native American Research and Training Center, 1986); Robert M. Schacht, “Engaging Anthropology in Disability Studies: American Indian Issues,” Disability Studies Quarterly 21, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 17–36.
3. Jennie R. Joe and D. L. Miller, American Indian Perspectives on Disability (Tucson, AZ: Native American Research and Training Center, 1987); Lavonna Lovern, “Native American Worldview and the Discourse on Disability,” Essays in Philosophy 9, no. 1 (January 2008), available at http://commons.pacificu.edu/eip.
4. Joe and Miller, American Indian Perspectives on Disability; Jeanne L. Connors and Anne M. Donnellan, “Citizenship and Culture: The Role of Disabled People in Navajo Society,” Disability, Handicap, and Society 8, no. 3 (1993): 265–80.
5. Locust, “Wounding the Spirit.”
6. Joe and Miller, American Indian Perspectives on Disability; Connors and Donnellan, “Citizenship and Culture.”
7. Carol Locust, Hopi Indian Concepts of Unwellness and Handicaps (Tucson, AZ: Native American Research and Training Center, 1987), 13.
8. Carol Locust, Apache Indian Concepts of Unwellness and Handicaps (Tucson, AZ: Native American Research and Training Center, 1987), 17, 24.
9. Ibid., 17.
10. Donna Grandbois, “Stigma of Mental Illness among American Indian and Alaska Native Nations: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” Issues in Mental Health Nursing 26, no. 10 (2005): 1005–6.
11. Jeffrey E. Davis, Hand Talk: Sign Language among American Indian Nations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3.
12. Jeffrey E. Davis, “A Historical Linguistic Account of Sign Language among North American Indians,” in Multilingualism and Sign Languages: From the Great Plains to Australia, ed. Ceil Lucas (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002): 3–35; Davis, Hand Talk, 19.
13. Locust, Apache Indian Concepts, 39.
14. Locust, Hopi Indian Concepts, 15.
15. Porter, And Grandma Said, 350.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Cornelius J. Jaenen, “Amerindian Views of French Culture in the Seventeenth Century,” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal: 1500–1850, ed. Peter Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 77.
2. John D. Bonvillian, Vicky L. Ingram, Brendan M. McCleary, “Observations on the Use of Manual Signs and Gestures in the Communicative Interactions between Native Americans and Spanish Explorers of North America: The Accounts of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,” Sign Language Studies 9, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 146, 149, 153; Jeffrey E. Davis, “A Historical Linguistic Account of Sign Language among North American Indians,” in Multilingualism and Sign Languages: From the Great Plains to Australia, ed. Ceil Lucas (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002), 6. See also: Susan Wurtzburg and Lyle Campbell, “North American Indian Sign Language: Evidence of Its Existence before European Contact,” International Journal of American Linguistics 61, no. 2 (April 1995): 153–67.
3. This dismissive attitude toward indigenous signed languages suggests that significant additional research needs to be done on pre-1700s signed language in Europe. It also raises the question of whether such languages existed in Asia and/or Africa.
4. Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (1976): 289–99; David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 703–42. See also: Gerald Grob, The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
5. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics,” 290; Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 121.
6. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics,” 296.
7. Cristobal Silva, “Miraculous Plagues,” Early American Literature 43, no. 2 (June 2008): 251–52.
8. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 85; Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” 736.
9. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” 737.
10. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 61; James M. Merrell, “The Indians’ New World: The Catawba Experience,” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal: 1500–1850, ed. Peter Mancall and James
H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 30. See also: Paul Kelton, “Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits: Colonial Epidemics and Southeastern Indian Survival,” Ethnohistory 51, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 45–71; Nile Robert Thompson and C. Dale Sloat, “The Use of Oral Literature to Provide Community Health Education on the Southern Northwest Coast,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 28, no. 3 (2004): 20.
11. Jaenen, “Amerindian Views of French Culture,” 77.
12. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1998); “The Massachusetts Body of Liberties” (1641), available via Hanover Historical Texts Project, Hanover College, http://history.hanover.edu; Parnel Wickham, “Conceptions of Idiocy in Colonial Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 4 (2003): 939.
13. Wickham, “Conceptions of Idiocy,” 940.
14. Parnel Wickham, “Idiocy and the Law in Colonial New England,” Mental Retardation 39, no. 2 (2001): 107.
15. Wickham, “Idiocy and the Law,” 104–13; Parnel Wickham, “Images of Idiocy in Puritan New England,” Mental Retardation 39, no. 2 (2001): 147–51.
16. Wickham, “Images of Idiocy,” 149.
17. Seth Malios, Archaeological Excavations at 44JC568, The Reverend Richard Buck Site (Richmond: Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, 1999), 12.
18. Parnel Wickham, “Idiocy in Virginia, 1616–1860,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80, no. 4 (2006): 683; Malios, Archaeological Excavations. See also: Irene W. D. Hecht and Frederick Hecht, “Mara and Benomi Buck: Familial Mental Retardation in Colonial Jamestown,” Journal of the History of Medicine (April 1973): 171–76; Richard Neugebauer, “Exploitation of the Insane in the New World: Benoni Buck, the First Reported Case of Mental Retardation in the American Colonies,” Archives of General Psychiatry 44, no. 5 (1987): 481–83.
19. Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649–1699 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 137–38.
20. Ibid., 138.
21. Lawrence B. Goodheart, “The Distinction between Witchcraft and Madness in Colonial Connecticut,” History of Psychiatry 13 (2002): 436.
22. Gerald Grob, The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7, 15; Albert Deutsch, “Public Provision for the Mentally Ill in Colonial America,” Social Science Review 10, no. 4 (December 1936): 614.
23. Grob, The Mad Among Us, 16.
24. Deutsch, “Public Provision,” 611–13; Grob, The Mad Among Us, 17.
25. Mary Ann Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and Treatment of the Insane (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 13; Carol Gay, “The Fettered Tongue: A Study of the Speech Defect Of Cotton Mather,” American Literature 46, no. 4 (1975): 451–64.
26. Robert J. Steinfeld, “Subjectship, Citizenship, and the Long History of Immigration Regulation,” Law and History Review 19, no. 3 (2001): 645–53.
27. Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1997), 32.
28. Valerie Pearl and Morris Pearl, “Governor John Winthrop on the Birth of the Antinomians’ ‘Monster’: The Earliest Reports to Reach England and the Making of a Myth,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3d ser., 102 (1990): 37.
29. Anne G. Myles, “From Monster to Martyr: Re-Presenting Mary Dyer,” Early American Literature 36, no. 1 (2001): 4.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Mary Ann Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and Treatment of the Insane (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 32.
2. Philip M. Ferguson, “The Legacy of the Almshouse,” in Mental Retardation in America, ed. Steven Noll and James W. Trent (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 46; Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 8.
3. Adams Papers, Diary of John Adams, January 16, 1770, Massachusetts Historical Society; Nancy Rubin Stewart, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 41; John R. Waters Jr., The Otis Family in Provincial and Revolutionary Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: Institute for Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 178.
4. Stewart, The Muse of the Revolution, 42–44; William Tudor, The Life of James Otis, of Massachusetts (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1823), 475–85; Waters, The Otis Family, 178–81.
5. James Otis (Sr.) to James Otis Jr., August 1, 1772 (Barnstable), Otis-Gay Family Papers Collection, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
6. Wickham, “Idiocy in Virginia,” 688; Mark Couvillon, “Patrick Henry’s Virginia: Three Homes of an American Patriot,” Virginia Cavalcade 50, no. 4 (2001): 158–67. Different resources give different dates for Sarah Shelton Henry’s death: either 1775 or 1776.
7. Wickham, “Idiocy in Virginia,” 687.
8. Philip D. Morgan, “‘Who died an expence to this town’: Poor Relief in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 139.
9. Karin Wulf, “Gender and the Political Economy of Poor Relief in Colonial Philadelphia,” in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 163–212.
10. Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness, 37.
11. Ibid., 41.
12. Albert Deutsch, The Mentally Ill in America: A History of Their Care and Treatment from Colonial Times, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 52.
13. Deutsch, The Mentally Ill, 52; Wickham, “Idiocy in Virginia,” 688–89.
14. Deutsch, The Mentally Ill, 52, 59–61.
15. John Wesley, Primitive Physic: An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases (Bristol, England: William Pine, 1773), 77.
16. Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (1976), 290; Nile Robert Thompson and C. Dale Sloat, “The Use of Oral Literature to Provide Community Health Education on the Southern Northwest Coast,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 28, no. 3 (2004): 20.
17. Alfred W. Crosby, “Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon,” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal: 1500–1850, ed. Peter Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 62.
18. David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 112–13.
19. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 376, 378.
20. Ibid., 386.
21. Ibid., 311.
22. Foreign Slave Trade: Abstract of the Information Recently Laid on the Table of the House of Commons on the Subject of the Slave Trade (London, 1821): 84–85.
23. George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (1927; repr. New York: Dover, 1970), xxxv.
24. John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Slave Ships,” 1834.
25. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves, 76–80; Thomas, The Slave Trade, 438–39.
26. James Oliver Horton and Louise E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 12; Darold D. Wax, “Preferences for Slaves in Colonial America,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 4 (October 1973): 382.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. David J. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).
2. Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew, eds., Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism, vol. 1 (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997), 48.
> 3. Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 43–44.
4. Daniel Blackie, “Disabled Revolutionary War Veterans and the Construction of Disability in the Early United States, c. 1776–1840” (PhD diss., University of Helsinki, 2010), 1–2, 36.
5. Ibid., 42, 49, 56; James E. Potter, “‘He . . . regretted having to die that way’: Firearms Accidents in the Frontier Army, 1806–1891,” Nebraska History 78, no. 4 (1997): 175–86.
6. Blackie, “Disabled Revolutionary War Veterans,” 60–61.
7. Ibid., 69–71.
8. Ibid., chapter 4.
9. Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 170–73.
10. For a smart and extended analysis of this, see Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality,” 33–57.
11. Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; With the Appendixes—Complete (Baltimore, MD: printed by W. Pechin, 1800), 143.
12. Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 35–36; Dea Boster, “Unfit for Bondage: Disability and African American Slavery in the United States, 1800–1860” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2010). While limited scholarship exists on slavery and disability, Boster’s dissertation is a marvelous beginning and sets a high bar for future scholarship.
13. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality,” 39–40.
A Disability History of the United States Page 21