Exploring Disability History in pre-Civil War America

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. People with disabilities have always been there in public places, in schools, workplaces, and at home. You wouldn't think it. Historically, it seemed that people with disabilities were hidden away. They were either homebound or segregated in institutions. Who can forget the now infamous ugly laws designed to keep people with disabilities out of sight and out of mind in public places? However, if one digs just a little deeper and starts to track down the objects of daily living used by people with disabilities, it's possible to uncover a rich history. People with disabilities worked, fell in love, and even ran for political office. Through crutches, pictures, and other historical artifacts, we can glean the irrepressible history of people with disabilities. Today, we discuss disability history. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI-audio. I'm Joeita Gupta and I'm coming to you from the Accessible Media Studios in Toronto. I'm wearing a crew neck sweater through round neck long sleeves. My hair's up in a bun. The sweater is, Matthew McGurk, my videographer, described it as a light purple, like a spring purple. It's another shade of purple. I'm quite fond of that color and I wear it quite a lot as you can probably tell if you listen or watch this channel on a regular basis. I came across a really fascinating person that I just had to talk to. Nicole Belolan is a number of things, is a scholar, writer, researcher, a public historian who investigates the material history of disability and also an independent consultant. I was really eager to have Nicole on the program to talk about some of her work and some of her interests. Nicole, hello and welcome to the program. I'm so pleased you could join us today.

Nicole Belolan:
Thanks, Joeita. It's great to be here.

Joeita Gupta:
I described you as a public historian. What exactly is a public historian? I didn't realize there were types of historians. What do you do as a public historian?

Nicole Belolan:
Thanks for asking. Public historians typically are defined as historians who do work outside the classroom setting or outside the academy, I think a better way to put it. Public historians work in museums as curators and educators. They work in fundraising. Public historians can work in libraries. Public historians work at federally funded parks, all those places where we're interfacing with the public in a regular way.

Joeita Gupta:
Oh, that's very interesting. When you're in these public-facing roles discussing history, how many inquiries do you get about disability history?

Nicole Belolan:
Well, it's funny. Lots of people don't think a lot about disability history and so they only start asking me about it once I tell them what I do for a living and then the conversation gets started. So it's not necessarily something I automatically get a lot of questions about.

Joeita Gupta:
And yet you got thinking about something that people don't have a lot of questions about. What set you on this path thinking about disability history?

Nicole Belolan:
It was not something that I anticipated, that's for sure. I did a master's degree at a museum called the Winterthur Museum. The degree is associated with the University of Delaware. That particular master's program focuses on using objects, so everything from the furniture in your house to entire landscapes to understand history, how people developed a family, how people did their work using physical things, the history of enslavement through objects. So there are all sorts of really interesting things you can learn about history through things. So objects or material culture, to use the more jargony word, is one example of a primary source document that historians use to interpret history. Primary sources are those things that people made in the time period you're talking about.
In this program, in one of the first research projects I worked on, I studied something called a close stool. Have you ever heard of what those are? They are often fancy but not always pieces of furniture that before we had indoor plumbing, people would put inside their bedrooms and use as a toilet at night. They would often put bedpans inside the closed stool. [inaudible 00:05:10] might have had a little less money might have just used the bed pan or the chamber pot, but people with a little more money could dress it up and hide it like a piece of furniture, like a chest [inaudible 00:05:21]. So I was researching this object and I was really fascinated by the fact that it did not look like a toilet and started to do more digging and started to look for mentions of these close stools in diaries of people from the time period.
One particular diary is from Philadelphia, Elizabeth Drinker. She lived in the mid to late 18th century and early 19th century. She wrote a lot about using the closed stool in times of illness. So that's the first time I started thinking about the relationship between objects and what people did when they were ill or possibly disabled at home. Then I did another research project about a woman who lived in the mid-19th century in Philadelphia who was chronically ill most of her life. She used needlework to stay in touch with friends and family. So those two big research projects got me thinking about or asking questions like, what objects did people use in early America to live with disability?

Joeita Gupta:
What time period in American history are you looking at? How far back do you go? How contemporary is your research?

Nicole Belolan:
I mostly focus about the year 1700, 1740 to 1840 or so. Most of the objects that I study were made using hand tools. They were made in a pre-industrial setting. They were made before Americans developed a medicalized assistive device industry.

Joeita Gupta:
This is really interesting because we have these different models of disability. Now everyone talks about the social model of disability. Before that, you had the ascendance of the medical model of disability, but it sounds like the period that you are studying, perhaps even the medical model of disability wasn't as prominent as it maybe grew to be in later years. How were people thinking about disabilities in the period that you studied, like you're saying the 1740s to the 1840s? What sort of ideas did people have about disability?

Nicole Belolan:
It really varied depending on the person, where they lived, their socioeconomic status, and their race. But the one thing that really always sticks out for me about this time period and disability, and I should say I've focused primarily on physical disability, though that doesn't mean to say there aren't overlaps with other types of disability, but the one thing about this period that is interesting to me is that people of disabilities of all kinds were extremely visible in early American life. For example, if you open any historic newspaper from 1750, 1840, 1800, you will read, for example, dozens of advertisements for people who ran away from their enslavers or [inaudible 00:08:26] who were there if they were indentured to someone. They often describe what the person looked like and these descriptions often will mention if they have a disability or if they were using a crutch when they ran away.
That's just one example of how visible disabled people were in early America. I think it's something people don't realize because of what you mentioned in your intro, what came in the mid to late 19th century, institutional revision, ugly laws, limiting people's access to immigration to the United States based on disability. Because of all these things, lots of people today don't realize how integrated disabled people were into everyday life in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Joeita Gupta:
Yeah, it's certainly news for me because as I said, I'm mostly thinking about institutionalization, segregation, people being out of sight, out of mind. Forgive me if this invites speculation on your part, but do you have any idea about when and why we went from seeing people with disabilities being more visible in public life to being sequestered away?

Nicole Belolan:
It's a complicated answer and I'm certainly don't have all the answers, but some of it has to do with what you talked about earlier in terms of the rise of the medical model and impulse related to disability, so that idea that disability isn't something you simply live with and manage, but something that must be cured or that you know can't have a good life if it's not cured, whatever that disability might mean. A lot of that developed over the 19th century with the professionalization of the medical field. That's only one response to that question. It's so complex and so interesting and it's great to be a part of a community of historians who are researching all these aspects of disability history.

Joeita Gupta:
Mm-hmm. No, and look, I didn't expect you to have all the answers and you certainly got more of an answer than I can offer to the question, so I'll take it. One of the things that I've often pondered because as a part of my role on this show, I read a number of disability memoirs and I bring those authors on and we talk about their journey and their experience and why they chose to write their memoir when they did. In looking at artifacts, going back to that period in history, you say that people with disabilities were really visible back then, but do we also hear their voice? Do we have letters and other surviving documents that give us a glimpse into the interior life of people with disabilities in that time period?

Nicole Belolan:
Absolutely. Typically, the written documents from folks from this time period, the ones that survive tend to be from wealthier white men, but still provides really helpful insights into how people felt being disabled. One example of that would be James Logan. He was the secretary to William Penn. For your American listeners, they might be more familiar with that name than perhaps your Canadian listeners. He was a guy high in government in colonial Pennsylvania. James Logan, in 1728, tripped and fell on a patch of ice outside of Philadelphia. He sat down to write about it to multiple people and he did this over the next 30 or 20 or so years that he lived. He wrote about this event and said that he became a cripple, to use his period terminology, not a word that we would typically use today. He recounted this story so many times in his papers that clearly, it became a defining part of his life.
When this happened to James Logan, he wrote about moving a bed to his parlour, his living room. He wrote about how people had to physically move him by putting pieces of fabric or bedding underneath him to move him while he was in the very early acute stages of pain. He's one of the people I've studied who has the most written documentation about his experience with physical disability. And of course, then we have to fill in the blanks about how he might have used his family, his friends, servants, perhaps some slave servants to help him get around the house. His experience is a good example of one of a person of a higher social status, but certainly one that gives us some insight into what it was like to be physically disabled in this time.
But also, I want to add that he used writing in particular to stay in touch with his friends and acquaintances like the way the woman I studied who did the needlework a hundred years later, how she [inaudible 00:13:48] in touch with folks. I think it's really easy to think about people as being shut away, but really, again, even if James Logan was at home a lot, he was still very much a part of his business circles, his intellectual circles.

Joeita Gupta:
Mm-hmm. Do you think the visibility that we see for people with disabilities in that time period has to do with the fact that there was an expectation that people with disabilities were also going to be contributing members of society and that they had responsibilities to their families to work, to bring home an income, and maybe in later years, you see the rise of the reform movement and the fact that people with disabilities had to be closeted and looked after and weren't really perceived as able to contribute in the same way to society or to their families?

Nicole Belolan:
Yeah, that's a great point. A fun example of that is another guy I studied named John Lukens, who was the surveyor general of Pennsylvania in the mid to late 18th century. He had gout, which is a disabling form of arthritis. Late in life, he ordered a very fancy carriage from a carriage maker down the street and he specifically ordered one that would be roomy and low-slung to the ground so that it was more accessible for him. I really think that this carriage was his way of doing exactly what you just said, making sure that despite his infirmities, he was out and about in Philadelphia in a very stylish carriage.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, yeah, no, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. It's an example of adaptation or accommodation before maybe those words became part and parcel of common parlance. I was looking over your website and you talk about Dr. Gruber who published or tried to have published the account of a woman writing letters from prison. I'm really glossing over the details. I'm sure you can fill it in for us, but he had an absolutely nightmarish time trying to get this account published because nobody felt that there was value in it, historic significance in publishing the lives and accounts of people with disabilities. Is that something that you run up against as well as someone who focuses on disability history still having to convince authors and publishers and editors that there's historic significance, or even you said you work in museums talking to curators and others in the museum setting about the value of including disability history?

Nicole Belolan:
Yes. Unfortunately, this continues to come up in a variety of settings, whether it's a publication setting or a museum setting. But unless somebody grew up with a disability or has a disability or know someone with a disability, it's something that a lot of people, I think unfortunately, are still afraid of or it's something that they just don't know how to talk about. I certainly probably wouldn't know how to talk about disability except that I happen to fall into this research interest. Because of that, I spend a lot of time advocating for disabled people using my research on disabled people in early America. I do a lot of workshops where I say, "Look how visible disabled people were in early America and it's a lot longer than this, but therefore, make sure you are making your museums, your libraries accessible for disabled people today."

Joeita Gupta:
You read my mind. It was actually going to be my next question. What is the value of disability history research to fighting ableism today? Other than advocating to make spaces barrier-free and inclusive, do you think there's value for people with disabilities knowing their own history as well?

Nicole Belolan:
Absolutely. I would think so. I don't identify as disabled myself, but as a woman for example, I've learned a lot about the history of women from historians and find that to be really helpful. And also, disability, as you know, affects everyone at some point and it affects with other parts of our identity, whether that's gender or class or race. I just feel very strongly that it's something we all need to have at least a working vocabulary to talk about.

Joeita Gupta:
Mm-hmm. In terms of our earlier conversation, I briefly want to touch on this because you talked about how in describing slaves who ran away, the advertisements in papers would often reference their disability. So that's one connection, but what other connections exist between the disability history that you study and slavery, which was very much intact at that time?

Nicole Belolan:
So much. I'm not an expert on the history of slavery. Many of my colleagues have written wonderful books on this topic, but for example, in some cases, an enslaved person's disability might affect their monetary value on the market. It would affect what types of jobs they might be doing for the people who owned them. It could affect their family life. It just goes on and on. It was a huge part of how the history of enslavement unfolded.

Joeita Gupta:
Mm-hmm. If you'll allow me to say this, I think one of the coolest things about talking to you is realizing that you in fact collect artifacts as well. So you're not just talking about them and researching them, but you also collect artifacts. Tell me a little bit about your collection and maybe if you have a couple of artifacts to share with us. That would be really amazing to see as well.

Nicole Belolan:
Certainly, yeah. I started collecting shortly after I took my PhD exams. I was looking on eBay and saw some historic photographs of people posing with crutches. They were at a price point that I could afford, so I started buying them. I have dozens of photographs of people with disabilities and I have a couple here that I can share with you. I also have a big collection of crutches. I have a crutch here I can share also. Let's see. I can show you. This is a late 18th-century tintype. It's a small photograph of a woman and two children dressed in plaid dresses. They're coordinated. One of the girls, at her feet, has a crutch. It looks just like a typical family photograph and there are dozens of these, not only in my collection, but in other museum collections in the United States and elsewhere.
Here's another photograph from about the same time period of three men, one of whom has a crutch and one of whom has, looks like, one amputated arm. So three guys. I think two are seated, one is standing. I have many more examples of this, but this is one example of something that I collect. As I said, I also collect lots of crutches and this one that I'm showing here is wooden. The interesting thing about it is that it has a bunch of little engravings in it. These engravings are people's initials. I don't know for sure why there are initials in this crutch. There is a crutch at the Connecticut River Museum in Essex, Connecticut that has a bunch of people's names on it. They wrote what kind of injury they had and on what date. I think it was used in a shipyard setting and part of a first aid kit that people must have just used when they needed it.
So this crutch that I have could have been used in that way also. I'm not entirely sure. But the interesting thing is that when I buy things like crutches at antique shops, people, when I bring them to the register, I think because again, we're not accustomed to talking about disability, they often say things like, "Oh, this looks like a spooky medical thing," or something along those lines. Depending on how my day is going, I try to [inaudible 00:22:46] them a little bit more about how they're really ordinary objects that lots of people use historically and today for acute and chronic reasons. So just a small selection of stuff I have, but I like to use them in those workshops I do to get people thinking more concretely about what disability is today, what it was historically.

Joeita Gupta:
That is so cool. You say you find all of these things on eBay. Wow, I had no idea. And of course, antique shops, that's a no-brainer. But how many objects would you say you have in all?

Nicole Belolan:
I should really do an inventory. I probably have dozens of photographs. I have maybe 12 or so crutches. I have a painting of a man in a wheelchair. I have a small vernacular style, so sort of locally made chair, local to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania with wheels on it with a little footrest for a leg that may have been made for a person of short stature, may have been made for a child. We'll never know, probably.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, Nicole, I wish I could keep chatting with you because this is really fascinating. Thank you so much for chatting with us today and sharing some of your artifacts with us, and also talking about how visible people with disabilities were in early America. I think that itself is such an important and powerful revelation. Thank you so much for being here today.

Nicole Belolan:
Thank you for inviting me. This was great.

Joeita Gupta:
Nicole Belolan is a public historian and independent consultant who talked today about her research and some of her interests, as well as her collection of artifacts dating back to early America, describing the material history of people with disabilities. Such a fascinating conversation. I really wish I had longer with Nicole to chat more about it, but I'm sure you can check out her website. If you google her name, it pops right up. You can look at some of Nicole's writing, research, and get pictures of some of her artifacts on her website as well.
Okay, folks, it's time for me to get out of here. It's been great chatting with you. Our videographer today has been Matthew McGurk. Marc Aflalo is our technical producer. Ryan Delehanty is the coordinator for podcasts at AMI-audio. Andy Frank is the manager here at AMI-audio, and I've been your host Joeita Gupta. We would love to have your feedback. You can give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. That's 1-866-509-4545. Let us know if you have your permission to play the audio on the program. Send us an email. Write to feedback@ami.ca or find us on Twitter @AMIaudio. Use the #PulseAMI. You can also follow me on Twitter @JoeitaGupta. But that's all for today. Thanks a lot for listening. Enjoy the rest of your day.