Disability and Democracy A DISABILITY HISTORY OF THE UNITED
STATES. By Kim E. Nielsen. Beacon Press. 240 pp. $25.95 In the
introduction to their influential 2001 volume The New Disability
History, editors Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky rightly
noted that American historians have largely overlooked
disability in their narratives. It is therefore invigorating to
read Kim Nielsen’s A Disability History of the United States,
which focuses attention on people with disabilities, some of
whom are known, and many of whom have been forgotten. Nielsen
excavates the long-buried history of physical difference in
America and shows how disability has been a significant factor
in the formation of democratic values. From the start, the
United States, perhaps more than any other nation, has combined
the opportunity to work with narratives of individual ambition:
The Puritan work ethic and the Horatio Alger story reflect a
cultural imagination that has always been preoccupied with myths
of individualism and independence. B