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Teaching Disability History in the Contemporary United States

[Editor’s Note: Below several scholars discuss their experiences in teaching a variety of courses that introduce students to disability history.  In the future, I am eager to present courses for other times and places.  The DHA will also be launching a syllabus pool that will contain annotated copies of syllabi as well as any relevant discussions. Please feel free to contribute anything you feel might be useful.]

Upper-Division Lecture Course: Disability and Culture in Twentieth-Century America

Catherine Kudlick, Professor of History, University of California, Davis cjkudlick@ucdavis.edu

When I sat down to draw up my first lecture course on disability history, I was struck by how many fewer  “teachable” materials there are for the rest of the world.  This explains why as a Europeanist I ended up designing a course on the  twentieth-century United States.  In fact, because I didn’t want to go through the bureaucratic ordeal of gaining course approval, I taught it under a generic “Topics in Twentieth-Century America” course.  Since the class was offered at an appealing time, and since few students bothered to read the expanded description of the class’s focus, sixty people showed up on the first day.  Though I was convinced that at least half would flee after the first session, miraculously only a few did.  And more miraculously, several added it, even though as you’ll see from the description, it was a demanding class.  Judging from their comments in office hours and in course evaluations, this “stealth” approach had its merits; several said that they would never have signed up for a class on disability history, but that they stayed because they were intrigued, and ultimately were glad they did.

For anyone familiar with disability history the class lacked some nuance.  I hammered home the message of needing to approach disability as a category of human experience on a par with race and gender.  Moreover, I relied much on contrasting the pathology and social models of disability because this was so new for them.  At times I felt uncomfortable with being so didactic; my usual method is to let students discover new perspectives on their own.  But the old ideas of pity are so deeply ingrained, that I believed it was more important to insist, arguing that I was teaching them a new approach.  A few complained about my having “an agenda,” but even these admitted that they learned something.

The course also benefitted from a brilliant teaching assistant who, despite having zero background in disability history and not identifying as a person with a disability, came up with a suggestion that helped unlock in-class discussion.  For the first few sessions I found it nearly impossible to get anyone to say a word.  My TA suggested inviting students anonymously to write down whatever it was they wanted to know about disability and disabled people but were afraid to ask.  I egged them on, urging them to be as politically incorrect as they could, and I promised that I would throw in a couple of my own questions for good measure.  I collected them, then grouped them into themes related to each lecture.  The questions were open and honest, but seldom as offensive as one might fear.  This being California, a lot of them centered around driving and “handicapped parking” stickers.  Another clump dealt with what were the proper words to use.  Still others asked about how a person with a disability did x or y. (A couple even asked about my own vision impairment.)  The amazing thing was, once they’d filled out the little cards and I made it clear that I would try to address the issues over the course of the term, the conversations about historical subjects flowed.  In fact, I think it was some of the best discussion I’ve ever managed to generate in a lecture class. 

I benefitted greatly from the insights of Douglas Baynton, Paul Longmore, and Jim Ferris when designing the class and assignments.  I also took advantage of being near the activist and scholarly disability community of the Bay Area by bringing a number of guest lecturers to the class.

Below, I provide the syllabus with my annotations [in brackets].

History 174D
Office: 4203 SS. Hum. Building
Fall 2005
Contact::  752-1635; cjkudlick@ucdavis.edu
Prof. C. Kudlick
Hours: W 9:00-10:30, F2:00-3:30 or by appt.

Disability and Culture in Twentieth-Century America

[I’ve learned from my friends north of the border that I in fact taught a class on the United States, not America!]

This upper-division lecture course will cover major topics in 20th-century American history - eugenics, immigration, the Great Depression, World Wars I & II, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and the emergence of identity politics - through a fascinating, little explored lens.  Disability has always been an experience shared by more than 20% of Americans, and even more if you consider family members.  But in a nation that celebrates youth, fitness, strength, independence, and progress, it has also served as a way of defining “normal” and what it means to be American.  One of our primary goals will be to understand disability not as the tragedy that befalls an isolated individual, but rather as a key social category on a par with race, gender, sexuality, and class.  Through a variety of physical and mental impairments, we’ll explore sites where politics, popular culture, economics, medicine, religion, and technology converge to create a new way of thinking about hierarchy and power.

Required Readings are on sale at the UCD bookstore and all are also on reserve in Shields Library, unless they are online.

Grading:  Writing plays a critical role in helping you come to terms with themes and ideas from the past; it will help transform you from a passive to an active learner.  In order to pass the course you must complete ten weekly reaction papers to the readings. You can use the questions for each week for inspiration, but you should not simply answer each question and move on; the idea is to think about the material synthetically.  Reaction papers must be typed (500 words, 1 inch margins, double-spaced 16 pt font =approx 2 pages 12 pt font) and will be collected on Mondays. I will grade three at random, and each grade will be worth 10%  You must turn in all assignments in order to pass the course. No incompletes will be given except in the case of a documented emergency.

Brownie points: Extra Credit will be given for attending and writing about various events that will be announced throughout the term. Class participation, visits to office hours and/or posting email responses can also help!

[much to my embarrassment, it’s only in annotating this that I realized that I had failed to offer a statement about accommodating people with disabilities!  I have experimented with different ones over the years, but still am not completely satisfied.  The current one I offer in my courses reads as follows:  Reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities can be made by talking with the professor and/or your TA as early in the quarter as possible; solutions that benefit one student can end up benefitting the class as a whole, so please feel free to come forward with any questions or suggestions.  You can also contact the Student Disability Center: http://sdc.ucdavis.edu/ or 2-3184.]

Schedule of Class Meetings

Sep 30: Introduction

Week of October 3:
Reading: Shapiro, No Pity, 3-40: Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, 1-110; visit the course website and explore three sites from the American Disability History resource list that intrigue you - record your impressions in an informal journal that will be useful for the paper assignment and take-home final exam.
Questions: How does each author present disability?  Do they share the same view?  What seems to be most difficult about disability?  What surprises you about what you’ve read?

Oct 3
Models of Disability and Disabled Models

Oct 5
Freaks and Geeks before 1900

Oct 7
America Takes Stock: the Progressive Era

Week of October 10:
Reading: Pernick, The Black Stork, 3-178; explore three websites specifically from the “Disability Organizations” list, take notes!
Questions: How did Harry Haiselden embody ‘progressive’ ideas?  What characterized these ideas?  What seems least/most surprising about them today? How do the media and scientific ideas reinforce one another in Pernick’s story?

Oct 10
The Eugenic Imagination

Oct 12
America Gets Ugly

Oct 14
New Ways to Read and Write

Week of October 17:
Reading: Baynton, “Defectives in the Land: American Immigration Policy, 1882-1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24:3 (Spring 2005); K. Walter Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare: the Politics of Disability Compensation for American Veterans of World War I,” in Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives, 236-67; explore more organization websites, take more notes
Questions: What role did World War I play in defining disability and disabled people? How would you characterize the relationship between immigration and disability?  How did the links that immigration officials drew between immigrants and disability reflect attitudes of the times they lived in? 

Oct 17
Defectives in the Land

Oct 19
World War I and its Aftermath

Oct 21
Changing Ideas of Citizenship

Week of October 24:
Reading: Sally Stein, “FDR, Disability, and Politics: A View from the South,” The Public Historian 27:2 (Spring 2005) 83-90; “FDR Memorial Controversies” on course website; explore more websites, take notes.
Questions: What similarities does the Warm Springs site share with the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC?  How do they differ? What can commemorations of national figures and/or events teach us about the past?  And our own relationship to the present?  What is at stake, and what makes the controversies so contentious?

Oct 24
America in Denial: FDR

Oct 26
The Battle for Social Security

Oct 28
IN-CLASS MIDTERM

Week of October 31:
Reading: Shapiro, 184-210; Bakke, xv-140; explore an organization website in-depth
Questions: What made John Doe a victim?  What is the relationship between disability and race in his story?  How might he have benefitted from the “revolution” Shapiro describes?  How does Bakke’s approach to the story compare to other depictions of disability we’ve read about this term?

Oct 31
World War II and its Legacy

Nov 2
The Cultural Transformation of American Medicine

Nov 4
Rediscovering the Asylum

Week of November 7:
Reading: Kim Nielsen, “Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness,” in Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (NYU Press, 2001) 268-91; visit the collection of Keller’s writings at: http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=1&TopicID=193 and pick three topics that interest you, and read the letters associated with them
Viewing: “The Miracle Worker” (1962)
Questions: Which of these media most confirmed ideas you already had about Keller?  Which challenged your ideas, and how?  How have new ideas from disability studies made historians rethink who Helen Keller was and her significance?

Nov 7
Helen Keller’s FBI File

Nov 9
Hollywood Does Disability

Nov 11
VETERANS’ DAY HOLIDAY

Week of November 14:
Reading: Harriet McBryde Johnson, Too Late to Die Young, 47-75; Jacobus ten Broek, “The Federation at Twenty-Five: Post-View and Pre-View” http://www.nfb.org/books/books1/wam07.htm#post
Website exercise
Questions: Why does Johnson hate the Telethon?  What ideas do ten Broek and Johnson share?  Where do you think they might disagree and why? What distinguishes them as people writing in mid-twentieth-century America rather than in some other time and/or place?

Nov 14
America Takes Pity: Jerry Lewis

Nov 16
Activists Take Aim

Nov 18
The Blind Fighting the Blind

Week of November 21:
Reading: Shapiro, 41-73
Web: visit one of the Virtual Archive websites on the “American Disability History Resources” section of the course website (excluding AFB Keller archive).  Instead of a response paper, write a two-page description/review of the site. What is its chronological and geographic focus?  What kinds of materials does it contain?  Do they seem exhaustive or more like fragments?  Is there anything you wished it contained but doesn’t?  Is it easy to use?  If you had only the information contained within it, what ideas would be most significant for understanding disability in America?  Don’t just answer the questions: think about presenting a cogent picture of the archive you chose that would be helpful to others.
Questions: How is disability similar/different from other movements for justice?  Is it fair to draw analogies with Civil Rights?

Nov 21
America in Turmoil

Nov 22
The Independent Living Movement

Nov 24
THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY

Week of November 28: COMPARATIVE WEB SITE ASSIGNMENT DUE NOVEMBER 30
Reading: Shapiro, 74-183; Johnson, 1-46, 76-132
Questions: Is deafness a disability?  What are the implications for seeing it as such?  Who has most/least to gain?  Which historical factors most influenced how people like Johnson and the Gallaudet students understood their place in American society?  How do these ideas differ from those of Jerry Lewis?

Nov 28
The 504 Sit-In

Nov 30
Deaf President Now!

Dec 2
The ADA

Week of December 5:
Reading: Shapiro; 211-339; Johnson, 133-258
Questions: Why are many disability rights activists against physician assisted suicide?  In addition to the eugenics movement earlier in the century, what other historical factors might have influenced their ideas?

Dec 5
The Ultimate Cure

Dec 7
Crip Culture Talks Back

Dec 9
Conclusion

TAKE-HOME FINAL EXAMINATION DUE WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1:30 P.M.

Comparative Web Site Analysis - Due November 30.

Using your skills as a historian, choose two web sites that you believe present contrasting views of disability to the outside world.  One should be from “Disability Organization Websites” posted on the course website; the other you are free to choose. In your paper explain what model or perspective of disability the site operates under - what is the organization's perspective toward disability, and toward disabled people? How do you know? Be sure to support your argument with specific references to the site (and include URL for the pages). Do not assume that your readers know the models - explain them concisely but clearly. As part of your analysis, figure out who the site's intended audience is. Who are they seeking to reach? Who do they expect to use their pages? Most importantly, how does it follow logically from material we have learned this term?  Whenever possible, bring in observations from lectures, class discussions, and course readings. 

All papers must be 1,200-1,900 words typed, double-spaced with 1 inch margins and 16-point font. (This is the equivalent of 5-7 pages in 12-point font.)

Copyright © 2005 by Catherine J. Kudlick
All federal and state copyrights reserved for all original material presented in this course through any medium, including lecture or print. Individuals are prohibited from being paid for taking, selling, or otherwise transferring for value, personal class notes made during this course to any entity without the express written permission of Catherine J. Kudlick. In addition to legal sanctions, students found in violation of these prohibitions may be subject to University disciplinary action

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