University of Texas Arlington

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Supervised internship in which students apply the academic skills they have acquired in Disability Studies courses.  Interns work at an approved business, academic, or non-profit site that focuses on adapted sports, disability history, assistive technology, disability rights and policy, or universal design and accessibility.  Students should complete DS 4395 as one of their final courses for the minor and must have already taken or be taking DS 3307/HIST 3307. 

The student intern commits to working for the designated organization for approximately 9 hours a week for 13 weeks of the semester in an unpaid position (~117 hours total). During that time, s/he will be trained and supervised by an employee of the organization who will keep track of his/her hours and evaluate his/her work.

The student will also meet several times with the Disability Studies Minor’s Director and and Assistant for the to report on his/her progress and will turn in a written capstone essay as well as self and site evaluations at the end of the semester.  This essay asks students to analyze your experiences in the internship through a critical lens. The internship experience is intended to provide students with an opportunity to apply the concepts they have learned in the classroom to real-life, real-world situations and thereby gain an appreciation of how theory and practice intersect. In this essay, students should evaluate to what extent Disability Studies concepts they learned taking DS courses were relevant, useful, or enhanced by the internship.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Supervised internship in which students apply the academic skills they have acquired in Disability Studies courses.  Interns work at an approved business, academic, or non-profit site that focuses on adapted sports, disability history, assistive technology, disability rights and policy, or universal design and accessibility.  Students should complete DS 4395 as one of their final courses for the minor and must have already taken or be taking DS 3307/HIST 3307. 

The student intern commits to working for the designated organization for approximately 9 hours a week for 13 weeks of the semester in an unpaid position (~117 hours total). During that time, s/he will be trained and supervised by an employee of the organization who will keep track of his/her hours and evaluate his/her work.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Supervised internship in which students apply the academic skills they have acquired in Disability Studies courses by working in a related non-profit or business environment. The student intern commits to working for the designated organization for approximately 9 hours a week for 13 weeks of the semester in an unpaid position (~117 hours total). During that time, s/he will be trained and supervised by an employee of the organization who will keep track of his/her hours and evaluate his/her work.

The student will also meet several times with the Disability Studies Minor’s Director and and Assistant for the to report on his/her progress and will turn in a written capstone essay as well as self and site evaluations at the end of the semester.  This essay asks students to analyze your experiences in the internship through a critical lens. The internship experience is intended to provide students with an opportunity to apply the concepts they have learned in the classroom to real-life, real-world situations and thereby gain an appreciation of how theory and practice intersect. In this essay, students should evaluate to what extent Disability Studies concepts they learned taking DS courses were relevant, useful, or enhanced by the internship.

This course will introduce students to the craft of history in a hands-on manner. Students will explore the nature of history, the standards historians seek to follow, different ways of writing history, methods for evaluating evidence, and how to structure a narrative. To better focus our investigations, this class will concentrate on the history of disability: a field that ranges from madness, prosthetics, and freak shows to wheelchair sports, and injured veterans, among many other topics. 

This course is designed to break the process of research and writing into a series of manageable steps and to help students build the analytical, research, and writing skills crucial for upper-level history classes.  We will begin by exploring major perspectives on the writing of disability history with a focus on U.S. disability history.  Students will then frame their own essay-length studies on a topic within the history of disability (with no geographic or chronological restrictions) that can be written using ample online primary sources as well as oral histories and other locally-available sources.  Past topics have included the history of accessibility in video games, masculinity and injuries in professional football, artistic representations of medieval madness, and uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, among many others.

This course will introduce students to the craft of history in a hands-on manner. Students will explore the nature of history, the standards historians seek to follow, different ways of writing history, methods for evaluating evidence, and how to structure a narrative. To better focus our investigations, this class will concentrate on the history of disability: a field that ranges from madness, prosthetics, and freak shows to wheelchair sports, and injured veterans, among many other topics. 

This course is designed to break the process of research and writing into a series of manageable steps and to help students build the analytical, research, and writing skills crucial for upper-level history classes.  We will begin by exploring major perspectives on the writing of disability history with a focus on U.S. disability history.  Students will then frame their own essay-length studies on a topic within the history of disability (with no geographic or chronological restrictions) that can be written using ample online primary sources as well as oral histories and other locally-available sources.  Past topics have included the history of accessibility in video games, masculinity and injuries in professional football, artistic representations of medieval madness, and uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, among many others.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Supervised internship in which students apply the academic skills they have acquired in Disability Studies courses by working in a related non-profit or business environment.

The student intern commits to working for the designated organization for approximately 11 hours a week for 10 weeks of the semester in an unpaid position. During that time, s/he will be trained and supervised by an employee of the organization who will keep track of his/her hours and evaluate his/her work. The student will also meet regularly with the Director of the Minor in Disability Studies to report on his/her progress, and will turn in a written report on his/her experiences at the end of the semester.

This course will introduce students to the craft of history in a hands-on manner. Students will explore the nature of history, the standards historians seek to follow, different ways of writing history, methods for evaluating evidence, and how to structure a narrative. To better focus our investigations, this class will concentrate on the history of disability: a field that ranges from madness, prosthetics, and freak shows to wheelchair sports, and injured veterans, among many other topics. 

This course is designed to break the process of research and writing into a series of manageable steps and to help students build the analytical, research, and writing skills crucial for upper-level history classes.  We will begin by exploring major perspectives on the writing of disability history; our primary focus will be on the United States but with some excursions elsewhere.  Students will then frame their own essay-length studies on a topic within the history of disability that can be written using ample online primary sources as well as oral histories and other locally-available sources.  Past topics have included the history of accessibility in video games, masculinity and injuries in professional football, artistic representations of medieval madness, and uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, among others.

This course counts towards the B.A. in History and the Minor in Disability Studies (http://disabilitystudies.uta.edu), the Leadership Studies Minor, and the culture course requirement for Interdisciplinary Studies, among other programs.

This course will introduce students to the craft of history in a hands-on manner. Students will explore the nature of history, the standards historians seek to follow, different ways of writing history, methods for evaluating evidence, and how to structure a narrative. To better focus our investigations, this class will concentrate on the history of disability: a field that ranges from madness, prosthetics, and freak shows to wheelchair sports, and injured veterans, among many other topics. 

This course is designed to break the process of research and writing into a series of manageable steps and to help students build the analytical, research, and writing skills crucial for upper-level history classes.  We will begin by exploring major perspectives on the writing of disability history; our primary focus will be on the United States but with some excursions elsewhere.  Students will then frame their own essay-length studies on a topic within the history of disability that can be written using ample online primary sources as well as oral histories and other locally-available sources.  Past topics have included the history of accessibility in video games, masculinity and injuries in professional football, artistic representations of medieval madness, and uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, among others.

This course counts towards the B.A. in History and the Minor in Disability Studies (http://disabilitystudies.uta.edu), the Leadership Studies Minor, and the culture course requirement for Interdisciplinary Studies, among other programs.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement.

Thanks in part to Mark Twain, “The Gilded Age” has long been denigrated as an age of excess. The Progressive Era, in contrast, has been celebrated as an era of enlightened social policy. But there was much more to the years between 1876 and 1920 than robber barons and moralistic reformers. Indeed, those decades established economic and social patterns that still resonate today. For many Americans, these decades were a time of optimism, of advances in science, economic opportunities, and social policy. Others found their citizenship rights limited or their fortunes crushed.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style class with limited lectures. Instead of my presenting a single historical narrative for you to memorize, we will evaluate competing historical interpretations and examine the primary sources used to create these narratives. Most of our time will be spent discussing the readings, films, or historical documents.

“Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write.”*  Indeed, twenty percent of the population worldwide has a disability, but the experiences of most people with disabilities remain invisible to us.  Traditionally, scholars treated disability as simply a medical impairment, rather than exploring its cultural and historical variability.  Historians of disability, in turn, have argued that notions of ability and disability play a crucial role in how we think about the world—a role on par with ideas about race, class, and gender.

The most important goal of this course is to help beginning students learn (and more advanced students to improve) skills in historical research and writing.  Using appropriate primary and secondary sources, students will write a 18-20 page research paper on a topic pertaining to disability history: a field that ranges from madness, freak shows, and justifications for colonialism and slavery to prosthetics, eugenics, and the treatment of injured veterans, among many other topics.

Topics are not geographically limited, provided that they are narrow enough to be analyzed cogently in one semester’s time and that appropriate sources are accessible via local archives (including UTA Libraries’ new Texas Disability History Collection), ample online disability history source sites, or inter-library loan.

*Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (NYU Press, 2001), p. 52.

This course will introduce students to the craft of history in a hands-on manner. Students will explore the nature of history, the standards historians seek to follow, different ways of writing history, methods for evaluating evidence, and how to structure a narrative. To better focus our investigations, this class will concentrate on the history of disability: a field that ranges from madness, prosthetics, and freak shows to wheelchair sports, and injured veterans, among many other topics.  

This course is designed to break the process of research and writing into a series of manageable steps and to help students build the analytical, research, and writing skills crucial for upper-level history classes.  We will begin by exploring major perspectives on the writing of disability history; our primary focus will be on the United States but with some excursions elsewhere.  Students will then frame their own essay-length studies on a topic within the history of disability that can be written using ample online primary sources as well as oral histories and other locally-available sources.  Past topics have included the history of accessibility in video games, masculinity and injuries in professional football, artistic representations of medieval madness, and uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, among others.

This course counts towards Minor in Disability Studies (http://disabilitystudies.uta.edu), a B.A. in History, the Leadership Studies Minor, the Health Studies Minor, and the University Studies major.  It also fulfills the culture course requirement for Interdisciplinary Studies.

This course will introduce students to the craft of history in a hands-on manner. Students will explore the nature of history, the standards historians seek to follow, different ways of writing history, methods for evaluating evidence, and how to structure a narrative. To better focus our investigations, this class will concentrate on the history of disability: a field that ranges from madness, prosthetics, and freak shows to wheelchair sports, and injured veterans, among many other topics.  

This course is designed to break the process of research and writing into a series of manageable steps and to help students build the analytical, research, and writing skills crucial for upper-level history classes.  We will begin by exploring major perspectives on the writing of disability history; our primary focus will be on the United States but with some excursions elsewhere.  Students will then frame their own essay-length studies on a topic within the history of disability that can be written using ample online primary sources as well as oral histories and other locally-available sources.  Past topics have included the history of accessibility in video games, masculinity and injuries in professional football, artistic representations of medieval madness, and uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, among others.

This course counts towards Minor in Disability Studies (http://disabilitystudies.uta.edu), a B.A. in History, the Leadership Studies Minor, the Health Studies Minor, and the University Studies major.  It also fulfills the culture course requirement for Interdisciplinary Studies.

This course will explore U.S. political, social, economic, and cultural history from 1865 to the present. The class will be structured around several overlapping themes: the ways in which U.S.  citizenship has contracted and expanded, the rise of large-scale industrial capitalism, the development of the modern American state, the technological innovations that allowed massive population expansion in the West and South, and the civil rights movement, and the rise of conservatism.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies, for which it is a core requirement (http://disabilitystudies.uta.edu).

Cross-listed as DS 3307.

This course will explore the history of the body: crippled, adolescent, dead, athletic, middle-class, slave, and migrant bodies, among others. Focusing on the intertwined themes of gender, race, class, disability, and the senses—and their intersections with social policy, medicine, and technology—we will approach the body as a historical text. We will examine how studying the history of the body can shed new light on the lived experiences of ordinary people, such as how the scarred and maimed bodies of slave and sailors in the early Atlantic world helped to inspire both slave revolts and pirate ships. We will also investigate how representations of bodies can illuminate political and cultural history—for instance, how cartoons that presented President McKinley as an effeminate weakling helped to push the United States into the Spanish-American war. Finally, we will explore how these two realms—experience and representation—have interacted to shape how individuals have perceived and understood their own bodies. Readings will focus primarily on the history of the body in the United States but will also include some transatlantic and British studies.

This course will introduce students to the craft of history in a hands-on manner. Students will explore the nature of history, the standards historians seek to follow, different ways of writing history, methods for evaluating evidence, and how to structure a narrative. To better focus our investigations, this class will concentrate on the history of disability—a field that ranges from madness, prosthetics, and idiocy to freak shows, wheelchair sports, and injured veterans, among many other topics.  

This course is designed to break the process of research and writing into a series of manageable steps and to help students build the analytical, research, and writing skills crucial for upper-level history classes.  We will begin by exploring major perspectives on the writing of disability history; our primary focus will be on the United States but with some excursions elsewhere.  Students will then frame their own essay-length studies on a topic within the history of disability that can be written using ample online primary sources, as well as locally-available sources.  Past topics have included the history of accessibility in video games, masculinity and injuries in professional football, artistic representations of medieval madness, and uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, among others.

This course counts toward the Minor in Disability Studies (http://disabilitystudies.uta.edu)

Cross-listed as DS 3331-001.

This course will introduce students to the craft of history in a hands-on manner. Students will explore the nature of history, the standards historians seek to follow, different ways of writing history, methods for evaluating evidence, and how to structure a narrative. To better focus our investigations, this class will concentrate on the history of disability—a field that ranges from madness, prosthetics, and idiocy to freak shows, wheelchair sports, and injured veterans, among many other topics.  

This course is designed to break the process of research and writing into a series of manageable steps and to help students build the analytical, research, and writing skills crucial for upper-level history classes.  We will begin by exploring major perspectives on the writing of disability history; our primary focus will be on the United States but with some excursions elsewhere.  Students will then frame their own essay-length studies on a topic within the history of disability that can be written using ample online primary sources, as well as locally-available sources.  Past topics have included the history of accessibility in video games, masculinity and injuries in professional football, artistic representations of medieval madness, and uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, among others.

This course counts toward the Minor in Disability Studies (http://disabilitystudies.uta.edu)

Cross-listed as HIST 3300-005.

Twenty percent of Americans have a disability, but the experiences of most disabled people remain invisible to us. This course will explore the changing lives of people with disabilities—from railroad workers and rights activists to wheelchair athletes and participants in freak shows—as well as the history of disability policy and conceptions of disability. Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our explorations in disability history will also offer a new way of looking at classic topics in American history, such as citizenship, work, gender, education, and the civil rights movement.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style, discussion-focused course with limited lectures and is accessible to non-majors. We will spend most of our time in class talking about the readings, films, or historical documents.  Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion.  Specific topics will include the eugenics movement, cyborgs, slavery and disability, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other disability celebrities, freak shows, disabled veterans, and the Deaf community.  This class also counts towards UT Arlington’s minor in disability studies, for which it is the core requirement.

Thanks in part to Mark Twain, “The Gilded Age” has long been denigrated as an age of excess. The Progressive Era, in contrast, has been celebrated as an era of enlightened social policy. But there was much more to the years between 1876 and 1920 than robber barons and moralistic reformers. Indeed, those decades established economic and social patterns that still resonate today. For many Americans, these decades were a time of optimism, of advances in science, economic opportunities, and social policy. Others found their citizenship rights limited or their fortunes crushed.

This course will be taught as a seminar-style class with limited lectures. Instead of my presenting a single historical narrative for you to memorize, we will evaluate competing historical interpretations and examine the primary sources used to create these narratives. Most of our time will be spent discussing the readings, films, or historical documents. Therefore, it is crucial that students do the readings in advance, take notes on them, and come to class prepared for discussion. 

“Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write.”*  Indeed, twenty percent of the population worldwide has a disability, but the experiences of most people with disabilities remain invisible to us.  Scholars of disability, in turn, have argued that notions of ability and disability play a crucial role in how we think about the world—a role on par with ideas about race, class, and gender. 

This course will explore the conceptual role played by disability in creating identities on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as how transatlantic encounters shaped both social policies and the lived experiences of disabled people from railroad workers, rights activists, and colonial subjects to cyborgs, slaves, and participants in freak shows.  Rather than treating disability as merely a medical impairment, we will investigate the historical and cultural variability of disability between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.

Our explorations in disability history (and, to a lesser extent, disability studies) will also offer a new way of engaging with major topics in transatlantic history such as colonialism, migration, slavery, policy transfers, identity formation, the rise of industrial capitalism, and problematizing the nation-state. Units will include: early modern religious and legal conceptions of disability; the asylum movement; eugenics, citizenship, and work; disabled veterans and rehabilitation; disability rights and disability culture; and contemporary disability issues in historical perspective.

*Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (NYU Press, 2001), p. 52.

This course will introduce students to the craft of history in a hands-on manner. Students will explore the nature of history, the standards historians seek to follow, different ways of writing history, methods for evaluating evidence, and how to structure a narrative. To better focus our investigations, this class will concentrate on the history of disability in the United States—a field that ranges from Franklin Roosevelt, injured veterans, and freak shows to wheelchair sports, insane asylums, and telethons, among many other topics.

This course is designed to break the process of research and writing into a series of manageable steps and to help students build the analytical, research, and writing skills crucial for upper-level history classes.  We will begin by exploring major and unique perspectives on the writing of U.S. disability history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Students will then frame their own essay-length studies of a topic on the history of disability that can be written using the ample online and local collections of primary sources.  Topics are not limited, but might include the role of presidential disabilities and chronic illnesses, experiences of workers in dangerous industries, the reintegration of disabled veterans, the Paralympics, and the role of ideas about disability in determining access to citizenship, among many other topics.

This course counts toward the Minor in Disability Studies.

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Thanks in part to Mark Twain, "The Gilded Age" has long been denigrated as an age of excess. The Progressive Era, in contrast, has been celebrated as an era of enlightened social policy. But there was much more to the years between 1876 and 1920 than robber barons and moralistic reformers. Indeed, those decades established economic and social patterns that still resonate today. For many Americans, these decades were a time of optimism, of advances in science, economic opportunities, and social policy. Others found their citizenship rights limited or their fortunes crushed. This course will be taught as a seminar-style class with limited lectures.