A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Individuals previously kept out of sight and mind began to enter the mainstream culture.Ī lively historical record that fills a gap in the literature.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

The final chapter marks the year 1968 as the beginning of improved understanding and enlightened policies. Slowly, individuals with potential, despite being branded, began to receive educational and vocational opportunities. In a slightly more upbeat chapter, Nielsen explains how those marked as disabled slowly banded together to fight for their civil rights. That institutionalization fell disproportionately on the enslaved (usually but not always because of skin color), women and those individuals sometimes inaccurately characterized as lunatics or idiots. The definitions would deprive many individuals of full citizenship rights as institutionalization became a trend. 'Disability' has always been an elastic term Nielsen explains how the definitions solidified in the legal and social sense in the 19th and 20th centuries. The disability spectrum within indigenous North American cultures expanded in unwelcome ways as European settlers spread disease among the Indians. Nielsen then moves on to the stories of newly arrived immigrants from Europe and Africa who were not fully functional physically or mentally.

The author organizes the book chronologically, beginning with the handling of disabled women and men by Native Americans.

of Wisconsin, Green Bay The Radical Lives of Helen Keller, 2004, etc.) interest in the treatment of the disabled began with research into the political activism of Helen Keller, perhaps the most famous of severely disabled Americans. Nielsen’s (History and Women’s Studies/Univ. American history examined sensitively and skillfully from the bottom up, grounded in the often shabby and sometimes exemplary treatment of disabled individuals.

A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen