Lots of people are writing about disability history. There are a growing number of great monographs, edited collections, and standalone articles that show the many ways that disability has a history and that it is a crucial lens to study the lives of people and the societies they lived in. There are a handful of review essays that serve as excellent introductions to the field, which gives the editors of this special issue a dilemma about what we should do in this introduction. Coreen Anne McGuire even recently published an article titled “What Is Disability History the History Of?” Yet the impetus for this special issue is a recognition that disability is also absent, or contained in its influence. In the past decade and a half, to take just one example, there have only been three articles about disability in the pages of this journal. As Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim Nielsen note in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History (2018), for many historians, “disability history — like disability itself — exists at the outermost edges of their consciousness.” This is surprising considering the growing prevalence of mental illness and aging populations in contemporary societies, both of which fall into our definitions of disability. Part of the reason is that instead of understanding ourselves as only temporarily able-bodied, Western society is designed around the idea of being constantly and consistently that way throughout life. Further, the very definition of disability is amorphous. It changes over time and between societies/cultures. The social model of disability reminds us that what is perceived to be a disability today may not have been one in the past, nor in different cultures today. Deafness provides a useful example. It is possible to understand deafness as a disability, as something that is a barrier to full participation in society that can often be medically ameliorated. Yet as deaf advocates suggest, it might be better understood as a difference, not a disability. People who share that difference participate in a culture that has a long and diverse history. Even in the same society, disability is a fluid concept. How an individual experiences a disability in their society intersects with their economic and political status, gender, and a myriad of other identifiers. For example, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has cogently argued, in the past (and even, we might argue, today), inhabiting the biological body of a woman was itself inherently disabling in many Western cultures. Enrico Dandolo’s experience of visual impairment in later life as the doge of medieval Venice was vastly different than those of other classes who experienced this impairment in the same time and place. Even how we talk about disability today in the Western world suggests it is culturally inscribed. Is a nonagenarian with a cane disabled? What about a baby who cannot walk? And would that change if the child were three years old? The readers of this journal likely have competing answers to these questions, thereby showing the fluid and contested meaning of disability. Fluidity notwithstanding, for historians, disability, among other things, is a category of analysis. Yet, as a discipline that in the past decade has often turned its back on class as a category of analysis, history does not seem very interested in adding other categories. In part, this might reflect the use of historical methodologies that isolate single causes or elements, but it makes intersectional analysis difficult, if not impossible. Yet, even in nonintersectional approaches, few historians have taken up the lens of disability when examining the past, even as those who do repeatedly show how including disability as …
