A History of American Citizenship Through the Lens of Disability

In this hybrid program, Sari Altschuler traces the history of disability rights in the US—from the wake of the American Revolution, when many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship, to the antebellum period, when disability was becoming a powerful, racialized tool of civic exclusion, to the end of the nineteenth century, when it was a target for eugenic elimination.

Using the literary, legal, and cultural history of disability, race, and citizenship, Altschuler shows how disability helped to shape US citizenship and, in turn, how the formation of US citizenship shaped disability. There were two key drivers of the transformation from accommodation to exclusion and eugenics: the difficulty aligning the reality with the rhetoric of civic inclusion and the co-opting of mental and physical difference as evidence in debates about Black citizenship. The stigmatizing ways race came together with mental and physical difference to deny Americans rights were, however, not inevitable.

Before citizenship was federally defined in the late 1860s, Americans were still working out what it meant. They used the narrative forms available to them—from melodrama and the gothic to the slave narrative and the criminal confession—to do this work. While possibilities narrowed by the antebellum era, Americans continued to imagine, articulate, and enact broader definitions. As we seek to imagine the relationship between disability and citizenship more equitably and expansively for ourselves, we should begin by remembering that many disabled and nondisabled Americans before us did, too.