To say that Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the world’s most recognizable artists is an understatement. In recent decades, […]
Reclaiming Richard III’s Disability
It’s been 10 years since archaeologists discovered Richard III’s skeleton under a parking lot in Leicester, England. But historians haven’t […]
“The Sex Lady Talks”: Disability Rights and the Normalization of Sex in a 1980s Institution
When recreational therapist Lisa Freeman began working in the Dual Diagnosis Unit at Indiana’s Central State Hospital in 1986, she […]
Such a Pretty Tsaritsa
In her 2018 memoir Such A Pretty Girl, Nadina LaSpina describes her childhood in mid-twentieth century Sicily, and the pitying […]
Pathologizing Politics: Eugenics and Political Discourse in the Modern United States
Carrie Buck was three months shy of her twenty-second birthday when she was forcibly sterilized on October 19, 1927. Buck’s […]
My Experiences with Auto-Immunity and Why I Dislike the Term “Able-Bodied”
I dislike the term “able-bodied.” I see this term used frequently in academic and activist scholarship, as well as everyday […]
VD in the Archives
For something that played such a prevalent role in life at the front, sex and venereal disease (or VD) have […]
Face to Face with Sharrona Pearl
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Sharrona Pearl about her new book, Face/On: Transplants and the Ethics of […]
Book Review: Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital
America’s oldest public hospital started as a tiny, one-room infirmary in a New York City almshouse in 1736. Two hundred […]
Come to the Dark Side: Disability as “Dark” Civil War History
By Sarah Handley-Cousins
While the rest of the world was happily decking the halls and calling for goodwill toward men, Civil War historians — in the now-famous words of Historista blogger and historian Megan Kate Nelson — were “freaking out.”
They weren’t freaking out because of the discovery of some great new source material, or an exciting new publication. They were freaking out because both Civil War History and The Journal of the Civil War Era, the two major journals in the field, each published an article in their December issues that criticized the state of current Civil War research and writing. The major concern for the articles’ authors — Gary Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier for JCWE and Earl J. Hess for CWH — was that Civil War military historians, already a dying breed, are being hurried to their demise by eager social and cultural historians who dismiss military history as unscholarly and old-fashioned. Earl Hess suggests that “understanding the real battlefield of 1861-1865 is essential to understanding everything else about the Civil War.”[1] Gallagher and Meier assert that “because the Civil War was a massive war, every scholar of the conflict should be at least basically versed in its military history.”[2]