@sarialtschuler
Associate Prof, Director of Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern. The Medical Imagination (Penn Press, 2018) + Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (Penn Press, 2026). Coeditor: Keywords for Health Humanities (NYU, 2023).
@drreznicek.bsky.social Also, I see from your banner that we both have related Spring/Summer 2026 books about disability and citizenship! Looking forward to reading yours and wishing I had known about it sooner!
Just coming across this many months later, and I wanted to say thank you! So happy to know this is making it out into the world.
Thank you!! (And just for clarity: all the chapters are about race, but that chapter is about a category that emerged in 1840)
Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.
wrote about the occupation in minnesota with a closing note on how the white house has exactly one tactic — repression with goons — but no particular strategy for dealing with entrenched resistance. gift link.
AOC: I want everybody to understand that the cuts to your health care are what’s paying for this. You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.
Federal authorities have tear-gassed a crowd outside the Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling. Follow updates here. bit.ly/3Lakres
In the video that the shooter took, which I believe was leaked to be exculpatory, he appears to yell “fucking bitch” after he shoots Renee Good.
Thank you!! Your friendship and support is a big reason it’s actually done! ❤️
Thanks for sharing, Aparna!
Thank you! It’s not available from the press yet, but it is from Bookshop and Amazon in case it’s helpful:
bookshop.org/p/books/befo...
www.amazon.com/Before-Disab...
Table of contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1: Insanity and Property
Chapter 2: Deafness and Testimony
Chapter 3: Blindness and Literacy
Chapter 4: Veteran Disability and Pensions / "Idiocy" and Education
Chapter 5: "Deaf, Dumb, Blind, and Insane Colored Persons"
After Disability: An Epilogue
As we seek to imagine the relationship between disability and citizenship more equitably and expansively for ourselves, we should begin by remembering that many disabled and nondisabled Americans before us did, too.
While possibilities narrowed by the antebellum era, Americans continued to imagine, articulate, and enact broader definitions.
Before citizenship was federally defined in the late 1860s, Americans were still working out what it meant. They used the narrative forms available to them—from melodrama and the gothic to the slave narrative and the criminal confession—to do this work.
The stigmatizing ways race came together with mental and physical difference to deny Americans rights were, however, not inevitable.
There were two key drivers of the transformation from accommodation to exclusion and eugenics: the difficulty aligning the reality with the rhetoric of civic inclusion and the co-opting of mental and physical difference as evidence in debates about Black citizenship.
Before Disability is a literary, legal, and cultural history of the relationship between disability, race, and citizenship. It shows how disability helped to shape US citizenship and, in turn, how the formation of US citizenship shaped disability.
By the antebellum period, however, disability was becoming a powerful, racialized tool of civic exclusion and, by the century’s end, a target for eugenic elimination. In Before Disability, Sari Altschuler tells the story of how this dramatic transformation occurred.
Here’s a little more about what’s inside:
The history of disability rights is often told as a recent one, but it is not. In the wake of the American Revolution, many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship—and for some even exemplified its promises.
This is a white book cover with an older American flag in the top half. The stars are replaced by the ASL alphabet. Below, the text reads: “BEFORE DISABILITY: A History of American Citizenship. Sari Altschuler”
It’s feeling very real!!!
Publication date: June 16, 2026.
@pennpress.bsky.social
This is what courage in the face of authoritarianism looks like. No university should take Trump's bribe & surrender their integrity — bending the knee to a bully only feeds the beast & puts ALL our rights at risk.
Others should follows MIT’s example ASAP.
Not sure how long this has been going on, but it looks like you can get my book and other great books for less than $10 right now!
Oh—thanks for posting! I didn’t know about this.
Thank you!
I guess this makes it real! Here's the page for my second book Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship - forthcoming with @pennpress.bsky.social in June 2026.
www.pennpress.org/978151282951...
Looks great!
This may be of interest to #MedicalHumanities folks (& we'd appreciate a repost) @ucdhumanities.bsky.social @tlrhub.bsky.social @oxmedhum.bsky.social @durhamimh.bsky.social @desfitzgerald.bsky.social @sarialtschuler.bsky.social @riacheyne.bsky.social @aryaray.bsky.social @the-polyphony.bsky.social
Remember, everything is part of the same story.
They need to destroy our democracy and crush dissent because letting billionaires take over the government in order to steal from us isn't popular and a functioning democracy wouldn't allow it.
