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Presidential Address: Ramsay Cook and the Writing of Canadian History, or What Can Ramsay Cook Still Teach Us?

Donald Wright
Ramsay Cook (1931–2016) rewrote Canadian history. Distinctly uncomfortable with nationalism, like his intellectual hero George Orwell, he insisted on pluralism. His best-known contribution to Canadian historical writing was the idea of limited identities, which he refined across the length of his career but never abandoned. He also embraced federalism, bilingualism, multiculturalism, and minority rights as the best guarantees of difference. Herein lies the distilled essence of Ramsay Cook the historian.

Discours présidentiel : Ramsay Cook et l’écriture de l’histoire canadienne, ou que peut encore nous apprendre Ramsay Cook ?

Why Not Disability History?

Benjamin Bryce and Donna Trembinski

Josef Prkna Goes to Court: Labour-Disability Rights, Discourse, and Enforcement in Habsburg-Occupied Bosnia

Isabelle Avakumovic-Pointon
In the summer of 1899, a woodworker named Josef Prkna sued his employer, Peter Buttazzoni, in the Sarajevo Small Claims Court. Prkna claimed that, while he had been recovering from typhoid fever, Buttazzoni had unjustly withheld part of his sick pay. Applying a critical disability studies lens to Prkna’s story, this article argues that sick, injured, and disabled industrial labourers in Austro-Hungarian Bosnia considered themselves bearers of legally enforceable “labour-disability rights.” This conviction arose, not from legislation, but from a polycentric labour-disability rights discourse that maintained that debilitated workers were entitled to sick pay, free medical care, and/or monetary compensation. Bosnian workers frequently used petitions and lawsuits to enforce these rights. Surprisingly, the Austro-Hungarian government regularly affirmed workers’ labour-disability rights in principle, despite rejecting most claims on factual grounds. This challenges the assumption, common in Bosnian labour historiography, that workers lacked meaningful insurance rights prior to 1902. It also encourages disability historians to examine how disability rights can manifest in administrative practices, civil justice, and disabled people’s own rhetoric, even in contexts without formal disability rights legislation. Finally, this article demonstrates that critical disability studies–inflected microhistory is a powerful tool for reconstructing the lived experiences of disabled people in the past.

Wounded Masculinity? Disability, Gender, and Canada’s Great War

Eric Story
War disability lies at the intersection of the wounded, injured, or sick military body and the society that gives it meaning. During the Great War of 1914–1918, more than 180,000 members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force became nonfatal casualties, compelling Canada to confront the realities of a mass disabling event. As Canadians reckoned with the scale of disability, questions of masculinity rose to the fore. War wounding was viewed simultaneously as proof of martial heroism and evidence of emasculation and dependency, leaving disabled veterans trapped between these two opposing views of military manhood. The state’s program of “vocational re-education” sought to reconcile this tension by casting work as a means to “overcome” disability and thus reclaim a masculinity deserving of returned soldiers. Disabled veterans pushed back against this premise. They exposed how the social meanings of visible and nonvisible disability shaped access to recognition, work, and masculine status in post-war Canada. While the Amputations Association of the Great War protested employment discrimination grounded in visible disability, the Tuberculous Veterans’ Association viewed their own struggles through the lens of nonvisible illness. By leveraging the apparency of war disability (or lack thereof), disabled veterans demonstrated that self-reliant masculinity was unattainable — even undesirable — so long as their disabilities were ignored.

A Convergence of Forces: Disability Rights and The Founding Moment of the Ghana Society of the Physically Disabled, 1980–81

Jeff Grischow, Magnus Mfoafo-M’Carthy and Augustina Naami
This article analyzes the postcolonial history of disability rights in Ghana by focusing on the founding and early expansion of the Ghana Society of the Physically Disabled (GSPD) in Kumasi in 1980. The GSPD’s founding moment occurred later than such similar disabled people’s organizations as the Ghana Association of the Blind and the Ghana National Association of the Deaf, which were created in the 1960s. We suggest several reasons for rise of the GSPD and the timing of its creation by focusing on a convergence of forces around 1980, as well as the longer history of disability in Ghana. More specifically, the article analyzes the GSPD’s founding moment through the lens of grassroots organizing and civil society in a particularly Ghanaian context. We also assess the connections between the GSPD’s first-generation organizers, government ministries, and international disability NGOs (especially Nordic organizations). As such, the article situates the founding of the GSPD within larger national and global disability initiatives as well as the history of disability in Ghana. Due to a lack of archival materials, our analysis is based on field interviews supplemented by written sources where possible.

(Dis-)Embodied Experiences: A Comprehensive Study of Mobility Aids in the Miracles of Saint Louis

Ninon Dubourg
This article examines the material history of medieval disability by studying two manuscripts of the Miracles of Saint Louis from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It argues that mobility aids not only rendered disability visible to medieval eyes and the historical record — much like the modern perception of the wheelchair— but also “augmented” the disabled body, enabling new forms of movement and autonomy. Adopting a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach, this study examines the diverse designs of mobility aids and their adaptability to the specific needs of individuals, depending on their environment. Far from being passive objects, these aids actively extended the body’s capabilities, transforming the impairment experience into one of greater mobility and agency. They also invite a reconsideration of embodiment itself, as the use of these aids blurred the boundaries between object and subject, physicality and identity. These material, inanimate objects become animated with the body, and inseparable from it, to the point of being bound to it, whether physically or socially. By tracing how these tools facilitated movement and autonomy, this article sheds light on the evolving phenomenological experience of non-standard embodiment, challenging modern assumptions and revealing the cultural significance of disability in the medieval world.

Dread Objects

Kathleen M. Brian
This is an account of dread objects — madness, suicide, suicidality — as they moved through the normalized and normalizing terrain of an emergent nineteenth-century US security state. Tracking them in this way, while also attending to the affective and temporal registers in which they were articulated, reveals a consequential distinction between intervention and prevention. The latter, still nascent at mid-century, cooperated with actuarial ways of thinking that continue to inform normative standards for engaging the past. This account doubles as lament. Addressing itself to the fundamental violence at the root of such standards, while also attending to what has been lost by way of them, it asks what methods and forms are made possible by disability as analytic and as epistemology.

In the Shadow of the Asylum: Gender, Madness, and Ableism in the Reform Work of Clarissa Lathrop

Michael Rembis
This article contemplates ableism in historical sources and in the historical discipline through an investigation of the experiences of Clarissa Lathrop after she left the Utica, New York, insane asylum in 1882. Lathrop, like other former asylum inmates, began advocating for asylum inmates’ rights, accountability for asylum physician-administrators, and policy change immediately upon her release from the institution. She testified before the New York State Legislature twice, came together with allies to create a reform organization, wrote letters to state officials and others, travelled and spoke publicly about the need for change in America’s asylum system, and self-published her account of her experiences. She and others received support from sympathetic journalists and politicians as well as other allies. Yet Lathrop was also dismissed and treated with disdain by her contemporaries, and she was largely forgotten by later historians, who considered her both unable to speak to her own, and others’, lived experiences and incapable of advocating for change. As this article will show, a gendered ableism that, until now, has gone either unnoticed or unaddressed by historians shaped Lathrop’s rich life and legacy.