"Because, as some have wryly pointed out, 'war is the most efficient way of creating disabled people,' it offers a unique view into how different coexisting ideas of disability came into conflict and how various policies for the civilian population emerged as a result. . . . [T]he volume covers a broad range of issues related to veterans in North America and Europe. Ancient Greece, sixteenth-century England, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, Americans in Vietnam, and Russians in Afghanistan together raise important questions about the body, the relationship between the home and battlefront, challenges to masculinity, the development of national identity, and collective memory, as well as the relationships among governments, policy, and self-advocacy. . . . But more than introducing readers to a little-explored corner of the past, Disabled Veterans in History forces readers to think differently about war itself. . . . If reading Disabled Veterans in History makes it clear that it would be difficult to write the history of disability without discussing war, it makes an even stronger case that it should be impossible to write the history of war without disability." —American Historical Review
