Two obituaries came to my attention this morning. Both women died more than a year ago, but I'm just seeing these now. If I write about them here, I won't forget to follow up with getting Wikipedia entries going about them, when the time allows.
I first mentioned Anita Lee Blair (pictured at left, a white woman dressed in a dark suit, in a portrait with her guide dog Fawn) at this blog a few years ago, when David Paterson had become Governor of New York, and the topic of blind elected officials was in the news. Anita Blair was born in 1916, and became blind after head injuries sustained in a car accident, not long after graduating from high school (no seatbelts or safety glass in the 1930s). She graduated from the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy; later she earned a master's degree as well. She was the first person in El Paso to receive a guide dog, a German shepherd named Fawn; she even made a short film about Fawn, to use on her lecture tour. Fawn and Anita made headlines in 1946, when they escaped a deadly hotel fire in Chicago. As far as anyone can tell, she was the first blind woman ever elected to any state legislature--she served one term in the Texas House of Representatives, 1953-55. (Here's a Time Magazine article mentioning that she won the Democratic nomination for that race.) She was also the only woman appointed to Harry Truman's Presidential Safety Committee, the first person to bring a service dog onto the floor of the US Senate, and later was a familiar presence in El Paso, vocal on talk radio and at city council meetings. Anita Lee Blair died in 2010, just a couple weeks before her 94th birthday, survived by her slightly younger sister Jean. Upon her passing, the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution in tribute to their former member. There's a video of Blair talking about her life on youtube (not captioned), and her El Paso Times obituary included a photo gallery from news files.
Betty G. Miller's obituary turned up in this month's Penn State alumni magazine. (Miller is pictured at right, a white woman wearing a hat and glasses, with a big smile.) She was a deaf child of deaf parents, and learned ASL as a child at home, but was sent to oral education programs also, an experience that became a theme in her works. Betty Miller was an artist, an art educator (she had an EdD from Penn State, and taught at Gallaudet), an author, and by her own account the first deaf person to receive certification as an addiction counselor. In 1972 she had her first one-woman show, "The Silent World," at Gallaudet. Further shows followed over the next several decades, and a large-scale neon installation by Miller is in the lobby of the Student Activities Center at the Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf. She was survived by her partner, artist Nancy Creighton. Some of Miller's works can be seen in this Wordgathering article by Creighton and at this Pinterest board.
Apparently, this is post #1000 at DSTU, according to Blogger (I suspect that count includes some drafts that didn't ever get posted, for various reasons). Happy 1000 to our readers, then!
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Friday, July 20, 2012
Reconstructing Lives (Edinburgh, until February 2013)
Current exhibit at Edinburgh Castle:
National War Museum
Fri 9 March 2012 - February 2013
Free with admission to Edinburgh Castle
From the official description:
"Reconstructing Lives takes a fascinating and moving look at the experiences of those who have lost limbs in war, whether military or civilian, and the technology which helps rebuild their lives....On display you'll find prosthetics, ranging from a 16th century iron hand to a modern i-limb hand developed by Touch Bionics."
Here's a report with photos, by someone who visited the exhibit. And here are blog entries about the exhibit, by museum staffers.
National War Museum
Fri 9 March 2012 - February 2013
Free with admission to Edinburgh Castle
From the official description:
"Reconstructing Lives takes a fascinating and moving look at the experiences of those who have lost limbs in war, whether military or civilian, and the technology which helps rebuild their lives....On display you'll find prosthetics, ranging from a 16th century iron hand to a modern i-limb hand developed by Touch Bionics."
Here's a report with photos, by someone who visited the exhibit. And here are blog entries about the exhibit, by museum staffers.
Labels:
amputee,
disability history,
disabled veterans,
history,
museum,
prosthetics,
Scottish,
war
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
RIP: Paul Longmore (1946-2010)

--Paul Longmore, "Why I Burned my Book"
Sad news today. Paul Longmore, professor of history and director of the Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University, has died suddenly. There will surely be many, many remembrances and obituaries; Stephen Drake's was the first I saw, at the Not Dead Yet blog. And Wesley J. Smith has something up (mostly the press release from Californians Against Assisted Suicide) at Secondhand Smoke.
Paul's facebook page is becoming an impromptu wall of condolences and memories. Here's what scattered items I'll add.
*When historians of disability submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Garrett case in 2000, Paul was the one who invited the signatures of over 100 scholars, because he knew exactly who to tap.
*I've been co-editing H-Disability since it launched in March 2001. But I had nothing to do with its founding--that's credited to Paul Longmore and the summer institute where the idea was hatched, long before my involvement.
*I'm president of the Disability History Association right now--but in many ways, the organization exists and thrives because Paul Longmore was very, very persistent when he saw an opportunity to support scholarship on disability.
*And when Paul organized a conference for disability historians in summer 2008, you know it was seriously accessible, not only to the participants but to our families.
Paul Longmore was a historian, with a PhD in history from Claremont Graduate School. It was important to him to know what your degree was in, and he worried about non-historians doing disability history without proper training or rigor. Now, none of my degrees are in history, even if I do historical projects. So it was a real and happy surprise to get a brief email from Paul, one day in 2004, just saying "I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your essay in the volume edited by Noll and Trent. It's really good history. Thank you." I kept that email window open for a very long time on my desktop. Thank you, Paul.
Labels:
California,
disability history,
history,
obituary
Monday, March 01, 2010
History Blog Carnival #85: Winter Olympics Edition

As I assemble this carnival, there seems to be a big-deal hockey game in progress, somewhere well to the north of my sunny beach town. Historians don't need goalie pads or speedsuits to do their thing, thank goodness, but it might still be advisable to wear a helmet and bring a broom some days. Aha, here they come now, the history bloggers, skiing and skating through time and across space...
HOCKEY: Watch that Puck
In the two-part post Particularities of Partition Literature at Chapati Mystery, Lapata explores how historians sometimes handle the experience of overwhelming events by passing the puck to fiction writers:
Major historical events lend themselves to fictional narratives precisely because massive population displacements caused by war or other disasters open up spaces in which to experiment...But fiction does not fill the gaps in the historical record, good historiography does.Elementaryhistoryteacher at the American Presidents blog writes The Ostend Manifesto to raise the question, what would have happened if Spain had sold Cuba to the US in 1854?
SKELETON: Or posts about becoming one
The Gentleman Administrator's King Death features a broadside of, well, King Death--aka "The Woefull Mirrour of Monarchy

At the Vapour Trail, Melissa Bellanta remembers This Holocaust of Ballet Girls: the tragic combination of hot stage lighting and gauzy dancing costumes meant that audiences in the 1840s might witness loveliness --or a terrible death-- from their theatre seats.
Raucous Royals encounters London's Most Deadly Invader --itself an impressive athlete in some ways. (Don't read this one with lunch next to the keyboard.)
SUPER GIANT SLALOM: Or, research takes the long way
Tim Abbott's Where was John Polhemus... at Walking the Berkshires is part of an extensive series investigating the Court Martial of a Colonel of the New Jersey Line in 1779. In this episode, the factual assertions of a Revolutionary War veteran's memoirs are tested against other records, and found to be exaggerated at best.
William Shepherd's current project on the 479AD battle of Plataea is another research challenge:
...one of those 1,000-piece monsters, perhaps a detailed old-master landscape, but the cat has been comprehensively sick on the lid of the box and, inside, there are only about 50 random pieces, some of them just bits of sea or sky. One or two of the pieces may possibly fit together, but there is an awful lot of space to fill-in in between.Meanwhile, Joachim Neander responds to a Holocaust denier about a specific event in 1941, at Holocaust Controversies, with hard details.
FIGURE SKATING: History is not as glamorous as it sometimes looks
The Bloom of Ninon was marketed as a lovely cosmetic preparation--but as Caroline Rance notes, an emulsion of white lead wasn't safe to spread on anyone's skin. Lauren Hewes at Past is Present observed a February holiday with a collection of Hairy Valentines (shudder).
NORDIC COMBINED:
A man swapping eyes with a falcon? Welcome to medieval Iceland.
CURLING: Looks funny at first, but look closer
Continuing the animal-human theme, Strange Maps has a map (imagine that) of the Secret Caves of the Lizard People -- under 1930s Los Angeles, of course. The Wellcome Library has graphs and posters related to the Swiss temperance movement of the early 20th century, including one tracing a close relationship between the price of schnapps and admissions of alcoholics to lunatic asylums. And a pink bathroom for your son? Nothing remarkable about that, in a 1954 plumbing ad at Retro Renovation.
SNOWBOARDING: New stuff to check out
The London School of Economics Archives blog, Out of the Box, announces a new online resource called "Round About a Pound a Week," which digitizes the household budgets of working-class women in 1909-1913 Lambeth.
THE PODIUM:
The gold medal for best snow-related history blog post title in February 2010 goes to M, for "Did Alexander the Great Fight a Yeti?" Being the World History Blog, I'm not sure which anthem to play for you, so maybe this is a good place for the closing ceremonies to begin. To cap off the carnival for this edition, the Library of Congress blog Inside Adams has a nice collection of links to their online resources on the history of winter sports.
Hosting the History Blog Carnival is fun--so fun that this is my third time around the track. Join the team! Sharon Howard is always looking for volunteers.
Thanks to all the contributors to this carnival: Manan Ahmed, Dainty Ballerina, Melissa Bellanta, Carlyn Beccia, Tim Abbott, Joseph McCullough, Sergey Romanov, Jennie W
Thursday, April 30, 2009
History Carnival #76: April Showers Bring May Flowers?
A gardening theme seems right for the May edition of the History Carnival--let's dig right in!
[Image below, at left: illustration of a hoe, shovel, and rake, bound up with a ribbon that forms a shamrock-like shape, with "P." on top and "H." underneath]
The Free Gardeners of Scotland, a nineteenth-century friendly association, had a fascinating iconography, as shown and described at the Bartholomew Archive blog. (Credit where credit's due: I found the Bartholomew Archive blog by following links posted at both Collins Maps and The Map Room. But it's about far more than maps; follow the blog's link for historian-pleasing posts about ornate stationery, obscure satirical cartoons, railway history, and much, much more.)
A garden is a nice place to read in the springtime... I'm partial to biographies of women, so I'll gladly settle into the hammock with a new book about Katherine Willoughby (at Philobiblon's suggestion), or the new bio of Anne Sullivan Macy (as discussed by its author, Kim Nielsen, at her new blog). Or just tour the various blogs posting in observance of Mary Wollstonecraft's 250th birthday (which happened April 27, hope you didn't forget): Historiann, River Fleet, and GypsyScarlett, among others.
Or perhaps you've got some old (really old) mail to catch up on. Captain Cecil Mainprise's letter from Tibet to his sister Delia is up at Field Force to Lhasa 1903-04; Marion Brown's sending frilly pink letters to her cousin's fiance in 1872, at my own blog of correspondence transcripts, Letters from Sanquhar. Or maybe you just need to sit in an alcove and think about big questions, like "the origins of World War I," or "What did the British Empire ever do for us?"
Hey, what's that racket? Aha, just the cats boxing. Or Fred Ott sneezing (garden's full of pollens). Or one of the other 70 short films the Library of Congress recently uploaded to their new YouTube channel. Read all about this latest LOC venture.
While you're digging deep to make room for a large root ball, be careful you don't dig into the abandoned subway tunnels underfoot. Exercises in "nostalgic futurism" can show where those lie, at Strange Maps. Meanwhile, Laura Wattenberg has been digging in the Social Security data to learn what the Great Depression did to American baby-naming trends.
Creepy things lurk in gardens, under stones, and in some blogs too... Erika Dicker shares a rather shocking "Object of the Week" at the Powerhouse Museum's blog--a century-old Radiostat machine, or portable therapeutic vibrator device. Just as implausibly constructed (and just as real) are the CIA assassination plots against Castro outlined in a recent post at Edge of the American West. Antonio Salieri certainly has an unsavory reputation, from the play and movie Amadeus--is it warranted? Romeo Vitelli at Providentia digs into the facts behind the rumors and drama. Meanwhile, North Carolina is in the painful process of uncovering that state's eugenic sterilization program, and making gestures of redress, notes the Carolina Curator.
How does your garden grow? "Don't be lax!"
You could import some especially sturdy varieties, like the Hungarian horses sent to India in the 1890s. You could hire some experts at creating dramatic landscapes--like the American Museum of Natural History did for their legendary dioramas. Clio Bluestocking is having some luck with growing enthusiastic students, through museum field trips and film clips. Or consider, as Alan Baumler does at Frog in a Well, the 13th-century advice of Zhu Xi on critical reading for a liberal education:
[Image below, at left: illustration of a hoe, shovel, and rake, bound up with a ribbon that forms a shamrock-like shape, with "P." on top and "H." underneath]

A garden is a nice place to read in the springtime... I'm partial to biographies of women, so I'll gladly settle into the hammock with a new book about Katherine Willoughby (at Philobiblon's suggestion), or the new bio of Anne Sullivan Macy (as discussed by its author, Kim Nielsen, at her new blog). Or just tour the various blogs posting in observance of Mary Wollstonecraft's 250th birthday (which happened April 27, hope you didn't forget): Historiann, River Fleet, and GypsyScarlett, among others.
Or perhaps you've got some old (really old) mail to catch up on. Captain Cecil Mainprise's letter from Tibet to his sister Delia is up at Field Force to Lhasa 1903-04; Marion Brown's sending frilly pink letters to her cousin's fiance in 1872, at my own blog of correspondence transcripts, Letters from Sanquhar. Or maybe you just need to sit in an alcove and think about big questions, like "the origins of World War I," or "What did the British Empire ever do for us?"
Hey, what's that racket? Aha, just the cats boxing. Or Fred Ott sneezing (garden's full of pollens). Or one of the other 70 short films the Library of Congress recently uploaded to their new YouTube channel. Read all about this latest LOC venture.
While you're digging deep to make room for a large root ball, be careful you don't dig into the abandoned subway tunnels underfoot. Exercises in "nostalgic futurism" can show where those lie, at Strange Maps. Meanwhile, Laura Wattenberg has been digging in the Social Security data to learn what the Great Depression did to American baby-naming trends.
Creepy things lurk in gardens, under stones, and in some blogs too... Erika Dicker shares a rather shocking "Object of the Week" at the Powerhouse Museum's blog--a century-old Radiostat machine, or portable therapeutic vibrator device. Just as implausibly constructed (and just as real) are the CIA assassination plots against Castro outlined in a recent post at Edge of the American West. Antonio Salieri certainly has an unsavory reputation, from the play and movie Amadeus--is it warranted? Romeo Vitelli at Providentia digs into the facts behind the rumors and drama. Meanwhile, North Carolina is in the painful process of uncovering that state's eugenic sterilization program, and making gestures of redress, notes the Carolina Curator.
How does your garden grow? "Don't be lax!"
You could import some especially sturdy varieties, like the Hungarian horses sent to India in the 1890s. You could hire some experts at creating dramatic landscapes--like the American Museum of Natural History did for their legendary dioramas. Clio Bluestocking is having some luck with growing enthusiastic students, through museum field trips and film clips. Or consider, as Alan Baumler does at Frog in a Well, the 13th-century advice of Zhu Xi on critical reading for a liberal education:
Here’s what is necessary: one blow with a club, one scar, one slap on the face, a handful of blood. Your reading of what other people write should be just like this. Don’t be lax!On the other hand, Zhu Xi also advised that
People beyond mid-life shouldn’t read much; they should simply turn the little they do read over and over in their minds. Then they’ll naturally understand moral principle.That's probably a good note to end on. Gather up your cuttings and shears. Thanks to all contributors and writers and readers, it's been fun, but now, the gardening edition of the History Carnival is over and done.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
And speaking of Braille...
Today is Louis Braille's bicentennial--the inventor was born on this date in 1809. (We wrote him up on 4 January 2007--probably should have waited!)
Friday, October 31, 2008
Welcome to the History Carnival #70: Trick or Treat!
Regular readers at this blog will be more accustomed to seeing the Disability Blog Carnival appear here, or announcements about it--but this month, DS,TU is hosting the History Carnival. So grab your bowl of leftover Halloween candy, your sugar skulls, your Diwali sweets, a warm slice of pumpkin bread, or whatever other season-appropriate snacks you want to munch during the costume parade. (Go ahead, I'm eating a lot of candy while I assemble this, so it might read better if you join me.)
[Image description: a vintage photo of a large group of people posed in costumes, taken in the 1910s in Pennsylvania. From my own family collection; two of my great-grandparents are in the front row.]
"the perils of prehistoric map hunting"
Heard about the cave wall in Turkey that was maybe the world's oldest known map? John Krygier at DIY Cartography reveals this famous image's more likely identity.
Want to be the King of Araucania-Patagonia for Halloween?
The short-lived South American kingdom still has a royal family in exile, and a flag, and now a website; if you're wondering about its borders, Strange Maps has the chart you need.
"regulation tight breeches and thigh-high leather boots"
Bellanta at The Vapour Trail takes us through the dressing rooms of the East End, to find actresses in Victorian London who played gun-toting highwaymen, wrought vengeance, engaged in fistcuffs, and otherwise kicked theatrical butt.
"The Irish Frankenstein"...
..."The Irish Ogre," and other political cartoons depicting Irish immigrants in America are laid out in Gwen's "Negative Stereotypes of the Irish," at Sociological Images.
"urban legends and hoary zombie errors"
What happens when a 'critical figure in English letters' just makes stuff up citations and all? And what if it involves roast pork and faux-Chinese faux-antiquities? Jonathan Dresner tells the tale at Frog in a Well: China.
"the louse and death are friends and comrades"
Daniel Goldberg at Medical Humanities offers a fine collection of images depicting the dangers of infection in various historical and geographic contexts. Be sure to scroll to the very end for the "I've got V.D." sandwich-board--definitely the worst costume idea I've seen this year.
"such foul slander and abuse"
Go read an extract from the speech Theodore Roosevelt gave after he got shot--about the inevitable effect of nasty campaign rhetoric has on audiences who are quite willing and able to be brutal and violent; at Ahistoricality.
"eat jellied eels and think distant thoughts"
Gregory McNamee asks, will Congress finally pardon boxer Jack Johnson? His 1915 conviction under the Mann Act was based on racial bias, according to the House resolution. As he says, "stay tuned."
"a jeweled metallic bra, long veils, and a jewelled headress of Javanese design"
Margaretha Geertruida Zelle is best known for her seductive Mata Hari costume, and for being executed as a spy in 1917 -- check out the details of her life at Elizabeth Kerri Mahon's Scandalous Women (in two parts!). Records released in 2000 showed her to be innocent of the charges against her. And apparently some of the legal files on Zelle won't be released until 2017, so stay tuned.
[Image description: Black-and-white portrait of Mata Hari in costume, seated on a pew-like bench, with flowers strewn at her feet]
Churchill said what?
Tim Lacy rounds up an impressive array of variations on a famous Churchill quote--which of them, if any, is the accurate version?
Ooh, I know, you're dressed as John T. Scopes!
The Smithsonian Institution Archives recently restored 52 previously-unpublished photographs from the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial, notes Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life. And they're all up on Flickr.
"the transformative figure she really was"
Green Raven heads into Election Day with a look back at Eleanor Roosevelt's life and work. [Link is working now.--PLR, 11/3/08]
"she was not a 70-year-old woman with a thick accent talking to us about the 1940s"
The school librarian, an assigned text in eighth grade, and a class speaker all had an intense effect on Progressive Historians' iampunha as a young person, because they were not what they first appeared to be--not boring at all, but writing, speaking witnesses to the worst of the 20th century. The lesson: "Justice is inched closer to when we do not stop talking about what happened, do not let people grow up without knowing what happened."
"stepping into their shoes...having a chance to retrace their steps"
The Spellbound Blog took a novel approach to Blog Action Day 2008, and mused upon Poverty in the Archival Record and Beyond--considering the documentation of poverty in photographs, music, newspapers, census records, maps, etc., and the problem of getting to first-hand accounts of poverty amid all the materials about it.
"a metal bird that we found in an old shed"
At Walking the Berkshires, a correspondent's 1915 suffrage artifact leads to biographical explorations of Massachusetts suffragists Gertrude Halladay Leonard and Teresa O'Leary Crowley.
(I love this entry, because I'm dressing as a suffragette for Halloween this year.)
"Take the humbles of a buck and boil them..."
Recipes from a 1772 cookbook spotlight the need for thrift and preservation (and a whole lot of salt and lard)--and prompt Historiann to be grateful for refrigeration. I suspect these dishes would haunt a house--and a belly--long past their welcome.
"...and made pilgrimages to their tombs"
Brian Ulrich considers the 18c. origins of Wahhabism.
Jules Verne Freely Translated
The Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections division recently held an open house to show off some diverse new acquisitions, including a first edition of Galileo's Starry Messenger(1610), a Mexican cookbook from 1831, 19c. Canadian editions of Mark Twain, and Jules Verne's The Baltimore Gun Club (1874), "freely translated" in a pirated edition.
Thomas Dolby's Aunties
Yes, that Thomas Dolby blogs about newly issued postage stamps that honor two of his great-great aunts--suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett and physician Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
"The doors ripped from their hinges"
And that's only the start of the destruction photographed by jdg of Sweet Juniper at Jane Cooper Elementary, a decommissioned school in Detroit. Read to the end. The images and the story may, indeed, haunt you.
BOOS and OOOHS
Dmitri Minaev at De Rebus Antiquis et Novis offers "a self-righteous critique" of Richard Pipes' monumental three-volume history of the Russian Revolution--but in the treats department, Minaev also says the books are "amazingly well written and thrilling." (And Pipes responds, in comments.) Mary Dudziak, meanwhile, reviews the new film W. as history at Legal History Blog, saying "Stone does something in the film that I expect historians will do: he put George Bush back into the history of the Bush Administration." Heather Munro Prescott reports from the Little Berks meeting at Knitting Clio, including thoughts spun from her panel with two other historian-bloggers.
********
That's it for this month's edition of the History Carnival. Join Jonathan Dresner at Frog in a Well: Japan for the next exciting installment. Here's the handy History Carnival submission form, or you can email or tag entries, according to the instructions on the main page. This was fun! Thanks to all the contributors, and to Sharon Howard for the invitation to host.
[Image description: a vintage photo of a large group of people posed in costumes, taken in the 1910s in Pennsylvania. From my own family collection; two of my great-grandparents are in the front row.]

IN DISGUISE
Be careful about answering your doorbell on Halloween in the history blogosphere. No telling who might appear on your doorstep, with what costumes, disguises, masks, and hidden identities..."the perils of prehistoric map hunting"
Heard about the cave wall in Turkey that was maybe the world's oldest known map? John Krygier at DIY Cartography reveals this famous image's more likely identity.
Want to be the King of Araucania-Patagonia for Halloween?
The short-lived South American kingdom still has a royal family in exile, and a flag, and now a website; if you're wondering about its borders, Strange Maps has the chart you need.
"regulation tight breeches and thigh-high leather boots"
Bellanta at The Vapour Trail takes us through the dressing rooms of the East End, to find actresses in Victorian London who played gun-toting highwaymen, wrought vengeance, engaged in fistcuffs, and otherwise kicked theatrical butt.
"The Irish Frankenstein"...
..."The Irish Ogre," and other political cartoons depicting Irish immigrants in America are laid out in Gwen's "Negative Stereotypes of the Irish," at Sociological Images.
"urban legends and hoary zombie errors"
What happens when a 'critical figure in English letters' just makes stuff up citations and all? And what if it involves roast pork and faux-Chinese faux-antiquities? Jonathan Dresner tells the tale at Frog in a Well: China.
"the louse and death are friends and comrades"
Daniel Goldberg at Medical Humanities offers a fine collection of images depicting the dangers of infection in various historical and geographic contexts. Be sure to scroll to the very end for the "I've got V.D." sandwich-board--definitely the worst costume idea I've seen this year.
"such foul slander and abuse"
Go read an extract from the speech Theodore Roosevelt gave after he got shot--about the inevitable effect of nasty campaign rhetoric has on audiences who are quite willing and able to be brutal and violent; at Ahistoricality.
"eat jellied eels and think distant thoughts"
Gregory McNamee asks, will Congress finally pardon boxer Jack Johnson? His 1915 conviction under the Mann Act was based on racial bias, according to the House resolution. As he says, "stay tuned."
"a jeweled metallic bra, long veils, and a jewelled headress of Javanese design"
Margaretha Geertruida Zelle is best known for her seductive Mata Hari costume, and for being executed as a spy in 1917 -- check out the details of her life at Elizabeth Kerri Mahon's Scandalous Women (in two parts!). Records released in 2000 showed her to be innocent of the charges against her. And apparently some of the legal files on Zelle won't be released until 2017, so stay tuned.

Churchill said what?
Tim Lacy rounds up an impressive array of variations on a famous Churchill quote--which of them, if any, is the accurate version?
Ooh, I know, you're dressed as John T. Scopes!
The Smithsonian Institution Archives recently restored 52 previously-unpublished photographs from the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial, notes Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life. And they're all up on Flickr.
"the transformative figure she really was"
Green Raven heads into Election Day with a look back at Eleanor Roosevelt's life and work. [Link is working now.--PLR, 11/3/08]
"she was not a 70-year-old woman with a thick accent talking to us about the 1940s"
The school librarian, an assigned text in eighth grade, and a class speaker all had an intense effect on Progressive Historians' iampunha as a young person, because they were not what they first appeared to be--not boring at all, but writing, speaking witnesses to the worst of the 20th century. The lesson: "Justice is inched closer to when we do not stop talking about what happened, do not let people grow up without knowing what happened."
HAUNTED HOUSES
"stepping into their shoes...having a chance to retrace their steps"
The Spellbound Blog took a novel approach to Blog Action Day 2008, and mused upon Poverty in the Archival Record and Beyond--considering the documentation of poverty in photographs, music, newspapers, census records, maps, etc., and the problem of getting to first-hand accounts of poverty amid all the materials about it.
"a metal bird that we found in an old shed"
At Walking the Berkshires, a correspondent's 1915 suffrage artifact leads to biographical explorations of Massachusetts suffragists Gertrude Halladay Leonard and Teresa O'Leary Crowley.
(I love this entry, because I'm dressing as a suffragette for Halloween this year.)
"Take the humbles of a buck and boil them..."
Recipes from a 1772 cookbook spotlight the need for thrift and preservation (and a whole lot of salt and lard)--and prompt Historiann to be grateful for refrigeration. I suspect these dishes would haunt a house--and a belly--long past their welcome.
"...and made pilgrimages to their tombs"
Brian Ulrich considers the 18c. origins of Wahhabism.
Jules Verne Freely Translated
The Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections division recently held an open house to show off some diverse new acquisitions, including a first edition of Galileo's Starry Messenger(1610), a Mexican cookbook from 1831, 19c. Canadian editions of Mark Twain, and Jules Verne's The Baltimore Gun Club (1874), "freely translated" in a pirated edition.
Thomas Dolby's Aunties
Yes, that Thomas Dolby blogs about newly issued postage stamps that honor two of his great-great aunts--suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett and physician Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
"The doors ripped from their hinges"
And that's only the start of the destruction photographed by jdg of Sweet Juniper at Jane Cooper Elementary, a decommissioned school in Detroit. Read to the end. The images and the story may, indeed, haunt you.
BOOS and OOOHS
Dmitri Minaev at De Rebus Antiquis et Novis offers "a self-righteous critique" of Richard Pipes' monumental three-volume history of the Russian Revolution--but in the treats department, Minaev also says the books are "amazingly well written and thrilling." (And Pipes responds, in comments.) Mary Dudziak, meanwhile, reviews the new film W. as history at Legal History Blog, saying "Stone does something in the film that I expect historians will do: he put George Bush back into the history of the Bush Administration." Heather Munro Prescott reports from the Little Berks meeting at Knitting Clio, including thoughts spun from her panel with two other historian-bloggers.
And finally (because I can't think of any way to categorize this one):
100 Years of Pink
A graphic timeline about the history of one color.
100 Years of Pink
A graphic timeline about the history of one color.
********

Friday, December 07, 2007
Radio interview with Burch & Joyner

Disability history on your iPod--it's a click, drag, and drop away. North Carolina Public Radio aired a nice long half-hour interview today with Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner, authors of Unspeakable: A Life Story of Junius Wilson (UNC Press 2007). It's online here.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
MacArthur Fellows 2007: Disability researchers in the mix
One of this year's newly announced batch of MacArthur Fellows is Yoky Matsuoka (b. 1971) an engineer at the University of Washington-Seattle. Matsuoka designs very high-tech anatomical models, including an intricate robotic hand, exoskeletal appliances to improve fine-motor use, and another project that uses wearable haptic devices in post-stroke therapies.
Another, Jonathan Shay (b. 1941, portrait at left), is a Boston-based psychiatrist and classicist who takes humanistic approaches to psychological injury in Vietnam (and now Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq) War veterans. His book titles may give a good flavor of his work: Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002). Shay is himself a stroke survivor who has experienced post-stroke paralysis.

Labels:
awards,
disabled veterans,
history,
prosthetics,
technology,
war
Friday, September 21, 2007
September 21: HG Wells (1866-1946)

Born on this date, English writer H. G. Wells. Wells had chronic lung and kidney troubles following a sports injury in his early twenties; he was also a co-founder of the British Diabetic Association (since renamed Diabetes UK) in 1934. His novels, particularly The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, have fairly obvious references to eugenics and evolution, normality, science, the senses, the mind, and non-standard bodies. But his short fiction is also full of these themes. So go read his classic short story, "The Country of the Blind" (1904). Or "The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes" (1895) or "Under the Knife" (1896) or .... well, three's plenty for starters.
Labels:
birthday,
diabetes,
history,
literature
Monday, September 03, 2007
September 3: Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

American writer Sarah Orne Jewett was born on this date in 1849, in South Berwick, Maine. She had rheumatoid arthritis from childhood, which must have been especially difficult living in northern New England long before central heating. Brrrr.
But her family (including her father and grandfather, both doctors) encouraged an active and independent childhood when possible:
...the Jewetts took a philosophical view of Sarah's illness, neither denying nor belittling it nor allowing to tyrannize over her life. They were sympathetic, but there was always the expectation that as soon as the pain subsided there were duties and diversions waiting, most of them outdoors. Her father believed that exercise was as important as rest in keeping the disease at bay, and she became amazingly active and sturdy, considering her handicap. A strong cross-country walker, she liked best to strike out across the fields, taking a book along, hunting out rare flowers and herbs and visiting favorite trees as if they were old friends. She was an expert horsewoman and rower, and she enjoyed skating, swimming, and coasting.(from Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work [DaCapo Press 2002]: p. 31)
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
August 28: Janet Frame (1924-2004)

'For your own good' is a persuasive argumentNew Zealand poet, novelist, and memoirist Janet Frame was born 28 August 1924, in Dunedin. She spent much of her twenties in mental hospitals, beginning with a voluntary commitment in 1947, ending with her final release in 1954. (A diagnosis of schizophrenia was made, but was later rejected by a panel of psychiatrists in London.) She underwent hundreds of electric shock treatments --"each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution," she said -- during her hospitalizations. Her mother had signed the paperwork for a lobotomy, but the surgery was canceled after Frame's 1951 book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, won a national award. She wrote a novel based on her family and her hospitalizations, Owls Do Cry, published in 1957. Another novel by Frame, Faces in the Water (1961), features a heroine who is institutionalized and almost lobotomized. Her novel Scented Gardens for the Blind (1980) has as its main character a girl who never speaks.
that will eventually make a man agree
to his own destruction.
--Janet Frame
Some cites on Frame and disability, to mark her birthday (plenty more cites here):
Simone Oettli-van Delden, Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness (Victoria University Press 2003).
Ana Maria Sanchez Mosquera, "Un/writing the Body: Janet Frame's An Angel at my Table," Commonwealth Novel in English 9-10(Spring-Fall 2000-2001): 218-241.
C. MacLellan, "Conformity and Deviance in the Fiction of Janet Frame," Journal of New Zealand Literature 6(1988): 190-201.
Susan Schwartz, "Dancing in the Asylum: The Uncanny Truth of the Madwoman in Janet Frame's Autobiographical Fiction," Ariel 27(4)(October 1996): 113-127.
Tanya Blowers, "Madness, Philosophy, and Literature: A Reading of Janet Frame's Faces in the Water," Journal of New Zealand Literature 14(1996): 74-89.
Venla Oikkonen, "Mad Embodiments: Female Corporeality and Insanity in Janet Frame's Faces in the Water and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar," Helsinki English Studies 3(2004): online here.
Labels:
birthday,
history,
institutionalization,
literature,
New Zealand,
poetry
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
CFP: Disability History: Theory and Practice
[Straight from H-Disability; links added by me]
Disability History: Theory and Practice
San Francisco State University's Institute on Disability, the Disability History Association, and the Disability History Group of the United Kingdom invite submissions for papers to be given at a conference at San Francisco State University, 31 July-3 August 2008.
During the past two decades, research, teaching, and scholarly publication on the history of disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon has drawn increasing attention. The goal of this conference is to assess the state of the field. It will examine the theory and practice of disability history. And it will explore theoretical and substantive, methodological and practical strategies to promote the continued development and intellectual coherence of this field.
We invite proposals for papers on any aspect or stream of disability history. For example:
· Cultural representations.
· The histories of blind people; people with cognitive/developmental disabilities; deaf and hard-of-hearing people; people with physical or emotional disabilities.
· Any historical era.
· Any culture, society, or geographical locale.
· Ideologies and the history of ideas.
· Institutions, professions, and programs that historically have affected people with disabilities.
· Public laws and policies: civil/human rights, eugenic, rehabilitative, international.
· Social and political movements.
While this call is open-ended as to subject matter, we seek in particular historical case studies that can open up discussion of broader issues. We invite papers that use presenters' current research to consider how they approach the history of disability. What theoretical concepts inform their interpretations? What analytical and methodological tools have they found most useful? How does their work benefit from or contribute to other fields of historical inquiry, such as social history, political history, the histories of class, economic systems, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth. If the work focuses on a specific stream of disability history, such as the history of blind people or the history of public policies regarding disabled veterans, what are its connections to and implications for other streams of disability history? How does their work draw upon the more general field of disability studies and what are its implications for disability studies?
Commentors will be asked to address these sorts of questions and to facilitate discussion of them in both breakout and plenary sessions.
We welcome proposals from scholars of every rank and status from academically based senior faculty to graduate students, as well as public historians, archivists, and other scholars.
Proposals for papers should include a title and be no longer than 300 words. Depending on the number of papers accepted, presenters will have 15-20 minutes. A curriculum vitae of no more than three US letter-sized pages must accompany the proposal.
Proposals may be submitted electronically via e-mail or fax or sent in hard copy through the postal system. Mailed proposals must include five copies of both the paper proposal and the curriculum vitae. We encourage electronic submissions to expedite decision-making and planning for both the conference organizers and would-be presenters.
The deadline for proposals submitted electronically via e-mail or fax is November 1, 2007. Proposers will be notified by December 1, 2007. Please send proposals electronically to:
Paul K. Longmore
Professor of History and
Director, Institute on Disability
San Francisco State University
longmore@sfsu.edu or
fax: 415-338-7539
San Francisco State offers a range of lodging plans that will accommodate both individuals and families. Some of them are economical and affordable for graduate students.
If you have questions, please e-mail Professor Longmore at longmore@sfsu.edu.
Labels:
California,
conference,
conferences,
history
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Ten Disabled Characters
For the next edition of the Disability Blog Carnival, host David has requested "top ten lists." I haven't slept for a few days (postoperative ornery kid), so forget careful selecting and ranking, and research is also, sadly, on hold. But I've got my bookshelves... so here are ten disabled characters in recentish novels on my fiction shelves (mostly). In no particular order:
1. Julia McNicholl Hansen in Vikram Seth's An Equal Music (Vintage International 1999) is a chamber musician, a pianist, with adult-onset, progressive hearing loss. By the time we meet her, she's taken lipreading classes and adjusted her performance habits to accommodate the difference; but she hasn't yet told any of her colleagues, afraid for what their reaction will be. So far, she's been able to rely on her experience of the non-audible ways musical quartets interact. The novel's narrator, her old lover and colleague Michael, is thunderstruck when he learns of Julia's impairment. He says "I would have expected more protest, more despair, more rage," and protests "You're taking it too lightly." To which Julia replies, "Well, Michael, it's for me to take. You would have managed somehow if this had happened to you. You might not think so, but you would have." (168-169)
2. Dick Musch in Molly Gloss's Wild Life (First Mariner Books 2001) is a very minor character--he has just one scene--but the history he reflects is important, and under-researched. The narrator, Charlotte, encounters Dick, "a boy with a wooden leg," living in a logging camp in the Pacific Northwest, around 1900:
4. Alice Beazley in Jennifer Vanderbes's Easter Island (Bantam Dell 2003) is the sister of Elsa, a main character in this historical novel, but her developmental disability is central to the plot, so she's no side character--we learn much of her interests, and skills, and feelings. Elsa apologizes for Alice a lot, and worries that Alice is a burden on a 1910s research expedition to Easter Island; Elsa's husband insists that Alice is no burden, for reasons of his own. In an early scene, Elsa remembers being scolded by her unusually enlightened father decades earlier, when there was talk of sending the young Alice to an asylum:
6. Zaren Eboli, also in Nicholas Christopher's A Trip to the Stars (Simon & Schuster 2000), is Auro's mentor and bandmate, a jazz pianist with eight fingers (no pinkies), who's also an expert on spiders (eight fingers, eight legs, see?). A particular kind of spider bite that creates longterm neurological effects (hypersensitive hearing and heightened memory, for example) is part of the novel's complicated plot. There's also a Vegas billiards champion in the book, who has a hydraulic billiards table that adjusts to his wheelchair's height. So this book is full of disability themes.
7. Frederick Law Olmsted in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (Vintage 2003) is also a real person, and this is another narrative history rather than a novel. Larson tells of renowned landscape architect Olmsted's involvement with the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, but also of his dementia, which became apparent soon after the fair: "It has today, for the first time, become evident to me that my memory for recent occurrences is no longer to be trusted," he wrote to his son in May 1895. He said "anything but that" to the idea of being institutionalized, but in the end he was, anyway--at the McLean Asylum in Massachusetts, the grounds of which Olmsted himself had designed. (p. 379)
8. Crake (Glenn) in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (Doubleday 2003) is the villain of the piece--he wipes out the whole human race, more or less, with a virus he's personally engineered and distributed. He's also a character who identifies as having Asperger's--in fact one of the chapters is titled "Asperger's U.," and concerns the main character's visit to Crake at school, which Atwood describes using the usual stereotypes:
9. Grace Dietrich in "Two Rivers," a novella in Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map (WW Norton & Co., 2002) first appears in the story as a deaf child living near the Ohio River in the 1820s, who uses her own gestural language or home sign, familiar to her family. "Grace lost her hearing when she was two," her sister Miriam explains to a visitor, "Most of our signs she invented, though we also use some she's picked up from her friends." (p. 148) With her sister and brother-in-law, Grace helps start an Academy for the Deaf in Ohio; the Dietrich sisters are also part of the brother-in-law's expeditions for fossils, with Grace drawing the detailed maps of their excavation sites.
10. Henry Day in Keith Donohue's The Stolen Child (Anchor Books 2006) is a hobgoblin who has taken over the life of a human boy in mid-20th-century America. Okay, being a hobgoblin is not exactly a disability under the ADA, but the "changeling myth" is an enduring story in disability studies (but see Goodey and Stainton 2001* on whether or not this story has firm historical basis). As a hobgoblin, Henry can imitate human form, but it's a constant effort; and likewise, he has to fake the memories and personality of the boy he's replaced. So there are commonalities with the experience of hidden disability and passing in Henry's story.
(*CF Goodey and Tim Stainton, "Intellectual Disability and the Myth of the Changeling Myth," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 37(3)(July 2001): 233-240.)
Two final notes: (1) Inclusion in this list does not constitute an endorsement of the book or the characterization in question--in fact some of them are pretty problematic--but I figure it's still worth knowing they're out there; and (2) The reason these are mostly from 1999-2003 is that I buy a lot of my books secondhand.
1. Julia McNicholl Hansen in Vikram Seth's An Equal Music (Vintage International 1999) is a chamber musician, a pianist, with adult-onset, progressive hearing loss. By the time we meet her, she's taken lipreading classes and adjusted her performance habits to accommodate the difference; but she hasn't yet told any of her colleagues, afraid for what their reaction will be. So far, she's been able to rely on her experience of the non-audible ways musical quartets interact. The novel's narrator, her old lover and colleague Michael, is thunderstruck when he learns of Julia's impairment. He says "I would have expected more protest, more despair, more rage," and protests "You're taking it too lightly." To which Julia replies, "Well, Michael, it's for me to take. You would have managed somehow if this had happened to you. You might not think so, but you would have." (168-169)
2. Dick Musch in Molly Gloss's Wild Life (First Mariner Books 2001) is a very minor character--he has just one scene--but the history he reflects is important, and under-researched. The narrator, Charlotte, encounters Dick, "a boy with a wooden leg," living in a logging camp in the Pacific Northwest, around 1900:
I leant back and rested my elbows on the bench beside him and commented upon his wooden leg in a mild and roundabout way. 'I believe I've seen half a dozen crippled men in coming four blocks through town,' I said, which didn't seem to offend or surprise him.3. Francis-Xavier Martin in John Bailey's The Lost German Slave Girl (Grove Press 2003) was a real person--because this isn't a novel, but a narrative history of an unusual legal case in antebellum Louisiana. Martin (1762-1846) was an eminent jurist and historian. He presided over the Louisiana Supreme Court for many years, at least a decade of them after becoming blind in his seventies. "Most men would have seen this as a reason for retiring, but not so Martin. When he was no longer capable of writing opinions, he dictated them to an amanuensis; or when none was available, he placed guides at the edge of each page so that he would know when to move his hand down to commence writing a fresh line." (p. 200) If a novelist created a blind judge to hear an appeal about whether or not a slave woman was really white, that would seem too perfect... but sometimes history works like that.
'Donkey boilers blow up,' he said easily. 'People fall from flumes, band saws break, a tree walks, a leg gets caught in the bight of the donkey cable. I guess there is about a hundred ways to get killed or hurt in the woods and the mills.' (p. 85)
4. Alice Beazley in Jennifer Vanderbes's Easter Island (Bantam Dell 2003) is the sister of Elsa, a main character in this historical novel, but her developmental disability is central to the plot, so she's no side character--we learn much of her interests, and skills, and feelings. Elsa apologizes for Alice a lot, and worries that Alice is a burden on a 1910s research expedition to Easter Island; Elsa's husband insists that Alice is no burden, for reasons of his own. In an early scene, Elsa remembers being scolded by her unusually enlightened father decades earlier, when there was talk of sending the young Alice to an asylum:
'Understand this,' he said. 'Alice does not need to be fixed. She needs to be cared for. And you will not now or ever refer to any of Alice's behavior as a problem or defect. Do I need to repeat myself?' (p. 40)5. Auro in Nicholas Christopher's A Trip to the Stars (Simon & Schuster 2000) is first introduced as a nervous boy with echolalia--he cannot easily initiate his own words and sentences, but can speak back the words that others say. This echoing makes conversations frustrating, but in music his ability to repeat what he hears is useful, so he sticks to the drums, and becomes a successful jazz drummer by book's end. (By young adulthood, Auro has also begun carrying a notepad for smoother communication.) Auro's cousin describes him, "though his speech disability made it sound as if he had a constricted thought process, that was anything but the case." (p. 143)
6. Zaren Eboli, also in Nicholas Christopher's A Trip to the Stars (Simon & Schuster 2000), is Auro's mentor and bandmate, a jazz pianist with eight fingers (no pinkies), who's also an expert on spiders (eight fingers, eight legs, see?). A particular kind of spider bite that creates longterm neurological effects (hypersensitive hearing and heightened memory, for example) is part of the novel's complicated plot. There's also a Vegas billiards champion in the book, who has a hydraulic billiards table that adjusts to his wheelchair's height. So this book is full of disability themes.
7. Frederick Law Olmsted in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (Vintage 2003) is also a real person, and this is another narrative history rather than a novel. Larson tells of renowned landscape architect Olmsted's involvement with the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, but also of his dementia, which became apparent soon after the fair: "It has today, for the first time, become evident to me that my memory for recent occurrences is no longer to be trusted," he wrote to his son in May 1895. He said "anything but that" to the idea of being institutionalized, but in the end he was, anyway--at the McLean Asylum in Massachusetts, the grounds of which Olmsted himself had designed. (p. 379)
8. Crake (Glenn) in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (Doubleday 2003) is the villain of the piece--he wipes out the whole human race, more or less, with a virus he's personally engineered and distributed. He's also a character who identifies as having Asperger's--in fact one of the chapters is titled "Asperger's U.," and concerns the main character's visit to Crake at school, which Atwood describes using the usual stereotypes:
Watson-Crick was known to the students there as Asperger's U. because of the high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; single-track tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude--these were not your sharp dressers--and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behaviour. (193-194)Hmm, David, why top TEN, anyway? Okay, okay, more:
9. Grace Dietrich in "Two Rivers," a novella in Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map (WW Norton & Co., 2002) first appears in the story as a deaf child living near the Ohio River in the 1820s, who uses her own gestural language or home sign, familiar to her family. "Grace lost her hearing when she was two," her sister Miriam explains to a visitor, "Most of our signs she invented, though we also use some she's picked up from her friends." (p. 148) With her sister and brother-in-law, Grace helps start an Academy for the Deaf in Ohio; the Dietrich sisters are also part of the brother-in-law's expeditions for fossils, with Grace drawing the detailed maps of their excavation sites.
10. Henry Day in Keith Donohue's The Stolen Child (Anchor Books 2006) is a hobgoblin who has taken over the life of a human boy in mid-20th-century America. Okay, being a hobgoblin is not exactly a disability under the ADA, but the "changeling myth" is an enduring story in disability studies (but see Goodey and Stainton 2001* on whether or not this story has firm historical basis). As a hobgoblin, Henry can imitate human form, but it's a constant effort; and likewise, he has to fake the memories and personality of the boy he's replaced. So there are commonalities with the experience of hidden disability and passing in Henry's story.
(*CF Goodey and Tim Stainton, "Intellectual Disability and the Myth of the Changeling Myth," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 37(3)(July 2001): 233-240.)
Two final notes: (1) Inclusion in this list does not constitute an endorsement of the book or the characterization in question--in fact some of them are pretty problematic--but I figure it's still worth knowing they're out there; and (2) The reason these are mostly from 1999-2003 is that I buy a lot of my books secondhand.
Labels:
books,
disability blog carnival,
history,
literature
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
August 15: John Metcalf, aka "Blind Jack" (1717-1810)
As a young man, he walked to London ahead of his travel companion, and in his twenties he carted fish and other goods from the coast to Leeds and Manchester, or between York and Knaresborough. His business became a stagecoach line, and he drove the coach himself. So he knew the roads very well when, in 1765, he won the contract to build three miles of new road between Minskip and Feamsby. He would, eventually, build about 180 miles of roads, noted for their good drainage and foundations.
Metcalf retired in 1792, but in 1794 he walked from Spofforth to York to dictate his life's story to a publisher. He died in 1810, at the age of 92.
[Image above: a drawing of Metcalf, made late in his life by J. R. Smith, 1801; for use in the published editions of Metcalf's autobiography. He's shown as a robust figure, holding a cane and wearing a hat and coat, with white hair curling down over his ears and collar]
Saturday, August 11, 2007
August 11: Andre Dubus (1936-1999)

American writer Andre Dubus was born on this date in 1936, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He was almost fifty years old, an ex-Marine, father of six, a prolific short-story writer and a respected writing instructor when he stopped to help an injured woman and her brother on the road. The three were hit by an oncoming car, killing the brother. Dubus saved the woman by pushing her to safety, but his own legs were crushed by the car instead. One amputation and years of surgery and therapy followed, and for the rest of his life Dubus used a wheelchair.
In his post-accident life, Dubus published two further books of essays, a collection of short stories, and numerous contributions to literary magazines. One of the essay collections, his last, was Meditations from a Moveable Chair (1998, cover at right shows a bearded Dubus in a wheelchair, near a ramp in a swamplike exterior). A comment here earlier this week pointed out that the title story of Dubus's second-to-last collection, Dancing After Hours (1996), features Drew, a wheelchair user and his assistant, and a waitress who has a strong memory about listening to Rahsaan Roland Kirk. (Ruth at Wheelie Catholic made note of Dubus last year, too.)
[Note: Last August 11, we marked the birthday of poet Louise Bogan.]
Labels:
amputee,
birthday,
books,
history,
literature
Incubation and Spectacle
For anyone who's visited a child in a modern neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), this 1904 illustration by May Wilson Preston (1873-1949) will come as a strange image. It was made for a serial in Good Housekeeping called "The Incubator Baby" by Ellis Parker Butler (1869-1937), which was published in book form in 1906:

What are all those people doing there? Shouldn't they be wearing gloves, or even masks? Where are the infernal beeping monitors?
In the early 20th century, incubators for premature babies were considered a fascinating technological novelty--but hospitals needed funds to purchase them, and that required public support for the idea. To raise interest, incubators were displayed to the public, with the babies still inside, many of them under 3 lbs at birth. "Baby hatcheries" were found at state fairs, and amusement parks like Coney Island. Admission was charged (10 cents), ostensibly to pay for the costs of maintaining the display, and for the lesson imparted by the "experts" on site, who answered questions about the babies and the technology. Some visitors returned again and again to follow the progress of particular babies; twins were especially popular. When babies reached a healthy weight, they were returned to their parents (who were not generally involved in the baby's daily care during incubation).
The Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children objected to the Coney Island exhibit early on, but it remained every summer into the 1940s. The Oral History Archive at the Coney Island History Project has audio interviews with several former "incubator babies" who were displayed in their earliest days. (Quality isn't terrific--one is a recording of a phone conversations.)
For further reading:
Hannah Lieberman, "Incubator Baby Shows: A Medical and Social Frontier," The History Teacher 35(1)(November 2001): 81-88. NOTE: Lieberman was a high school student in Minneapolis when she wrote this essay, which won the National History Day 2001 Competition for Senior Division Historical Paper.
A. J. Liebling, "A Patron of the Preemies," New Yorker (June 3, 1939): 20-24.

What are all those people doing there? Shouldn't they be wearing gloves, or even masks? Where are the infernal beeping monitors?
In the early 20th century, incubators for premature babies were considered a fascinating technological novelty--but hospitals needed funds to purchase them, and that required public support for the idea. To raise interest, incubators were displayed to the public, with the babies still inside, many of them under 3 lbs at birth. "Baby hatcheries" were found at state fairs, and amusement parks like Coney Island. Admission was charged (10 cents), ostensibly to pay for the costs of maintaining the display, and for the lesson imparted by the "experts" on site, who answered questions about the babies and the technology. Some visitors returned again and again to follow the progress of particular babies; twins were especially popular. When babies reached a healthy weight, they were returned to their parents (who were not generally involved in the baby's daily care during incubation).
The Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children objected to the Coney Island exhibit early on, but it remained every summer into the 1940s. The Oral History Archive at the Coney Island History Project has audio interviews with several former "incubator babies" who were displayed in their earliest days. (Quality isn't terrific--one is a recording of a phone conversations.)
For further reading:
Hannah Lieberman, "Incubator Baby Shows: A Medical and Social Frontier," The History Teacher 35(1)(November 2001): 81-88. NOTE: Lieberman was a high school student in Minneapolis when she wrote this essay, which won the National History Day 2001 Competition for Senior Division Historical Paper.
A. J. Liebling, "A Patron of the Preemies," New Yorker (June 3, 1939): 20-24.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
August 7: Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1936-1977)

Kirk was blind from infancy. He attended the Ohio State School for the Blind, where he played in the school band. He was playing professionally while still in his teens, and recorded his first album before he was old enough to vote, in 1956.
In 1975, Kirk had a stroke with lasting hemiplegia--so he modified some of his instruments to be played with just one hand. In the winter of 1977, Kirk had a second stroke, which was fatal. He was just 41 years old.
Check out Kirk in performance on YouTube, here, here, here, and here, for starters.
Monday, August 06, 2007
New Book: Writing Deafness

How did Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, and James Fenimore Cooper employ deafness themes and deaf characters? Check out Christopher Krentz's new book, Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (UNC Press 2007; cover shown at right). Krentz is an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, and also editor of A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816-1864 (Gallaudet University Press 2000).
Austin's Lady Bird Lake
Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) took on "highway beautification" as a project while she was First Lady in the Sixties. Pretty safe choice for a fifty-something Southern lady, in a socially tumultuous decade. Except... her beautification agenda eventually paid off for a civil rights movement anyway. By working for more park land and recreational spaces close to urban areas, Johnson paved the way (almost literally) for wheelchair-accessible recreation areas, too.
Town Lake in Austin, Texas, was one example of this phenomenon. Formerly a "garbage-strewn eyesore," in the words of one former mayor, the Lake (really a reservoir) has since become a "jewel" in the state capital. Hundreds of trees were planted, trails were laid out, and it's now a favorite spot for many Austin residents. After leaving the White House, the Johnsons were Austin residents themselves; and after her stroke in 2001, Lady Bird used a wheelchair. Her daughter Luci said that they loved to go around the lake trail in her last years. "We discovered it was wheelchair accessible--although not quite enough," said Luci.
Now that the lake has been renamed Lady Bird Lake, Luci hopes that the city will honor the spirit of its namesake, improving and increasing the accessible trail's reach. (As Katja recently observed, some people really do want recreational wheelchair access that goes more than a few hundred feet.) If you're in Austin sometime, go see if they've met that goal.
Prefer to stay on the West Coast? The Lady Bird Johnson Grove in Redwood National Park also boasts a one-mile wheelchair-accessible trail.
Town Lake in Austin, Texas, was one example of this phenomenon. Formerly a "garbage-strewn eyesore," in the words of one former mayor, the Lake (really a reservoir) has since become a "jewel" in the state capital. Hundreds of trees were planted, trails were laid out, and it's now a favorite spot for many Austin residents. After leaving the White House, the Johnsons were Austin residents themselves; and after her stroke in 2001, Lady Bird used a wheelchair. Her daughter Luci said that they loved to go around the lake trail in her last years. "We discovered it was wheelchair accessible--although not quite enough," said Luci.
Now that the lake has been renamed Lady Bird Lake, Luci hopes that the city will honor the spirit of its namesake, improving and increasing the accessible trail's reach. (As Katja recently observed, some people really do want recreational wheelchair access that goes more than a few hundred feet.) If you're in Austin sometime, go see if they've met that goal.
Prefer to stay on the West Coast? The Lady Bird Johnson Grove in Redwood National Park also boasts a one-mile wheelchair-accessible trail.
Labels:
accessibility,
history,
recreation,
travel
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