Public History, Disability, and Eugenics

This presentation will explore the interplay between disability history and public history, focusing on questions about the creation and dissemination of historical knowledge about eugenics and sterilization. Historians in each of these fields value community engagement and the usefulness of history beyond the academy. Public histories shape how we as a society remember—and just as importantly, how we forget—the eugenics movement and the experiences of disabled people. Few historians have applied a critical disability lens to the American eugenics movement and its legacies. Part of the problem is restricted access to archival materials, yet we seem to be reluctant publicly to advocate for research policy clarifications. More broadly, as Kim Nielsen puts it, historians need to pose “questions about past definitions of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ bodies and minds.” Such questions about disability are mostly absent from public symposia, commemorations, and websites featuring eugenics resources. Most official state apologies for eugenics, as another kind of public history, also fail to encompass disability social justice. Disabled people (as well as poor people) are either invisible or taken as the “deserving” victims of the sterilization movement. How can public historians of disability and eugenics effectively interact with various constituencies, including disability communities, journalists, government, medical science, and the general public? How can we tell complex stories of disability oppression, resistance, and agency that are historically nuanced, intersectional, and grounded in theory, yet also understandable and responsive to our public(s)?