Before Disability

Sari Altschuler is Associate Professor of English and Founding Director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern University. She is co-editor of Keywords for Health Humanities and the author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States, which is also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"Before Disability is a fascinating and insightful work that explains the central role 'disability' avant la lettre played in the evolution of US citizenship from the Revolution to the Civil War (and ultimately into the present). Sari Altschuler demonstrates not only the role of disability in legal and cultural belonging but how the debates around the nature of disability helped to shape the character of the times. An exquisite book." - Priscilla Wald, Duke University"Before Disability is a terrific book. It will take its place alongside the exciting new work that is offering an ambitious and generative rewriting of US citizenship from the perspective of race and disability. Sari Altschuler shows how ideas about race, disability, and capacity were baked into conceptions of American citizenship from the outset—and she reads those complex conceptions through literary texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Wilson, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Crafts." - Michael Bérubé, Pennsylvania State University"In Before Disability, Sari Altschuler brings the history of age-old categories such as blind, deaf, and mad into our current concepts of disability as a civil and human rights category and identity. This meticulous history connects Americans' experience and understanding of bodily difference from the country's earliest years to our present moment, tracing the arc of disability through lives and across communities. This eloquent and graceful story clarifies the persisting endurance of disability experience as a force that shaped the history of American citizenship." - Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University