Projektnummer

0060643

Zusammenfassung

Postbellum racial discourse is awash in tropes of disability, from the uplift memoir's sentimental rhetoric of "overcoming" to the ubiquity of phrases like "racial handicap" in the writings of social reformers, policy experts, and black leaders like Booker T. Washington. Language that may strike us as merely figurative, however, actually bears witness to the material and institutional histories linking disability rehabilitation and racial uplift across the long nineteenth century. "Racial Handicap" tells the story of how a Progressive movement to integrate people with disabilities into...