ABSTRACT
Historians grapple with and learn from disability via two distinct but overlapping methods of analyzing change over time. First, they examine the daily and structural lives of those considered disabled and others who interact with them; second, they analyze changing historical conceptualizations of disability, able-bodiedness, and able-mindedness. Many disability historians also explore disability and ableism's relation to other frameworks of power-such as race, class, sexuality, age, gender, and family. Historians' rigorous consideration of context and developments across time is particularly important for the social (relational) model of disability. Disabled slaves in the United States, like all enslaved peoples, sought to resist slavery and shape their own lives. Wars and conflict provide additional and vivid examples of the relationship between historical forces and historical actors shaping the experiences and meanings of disability. Disability history is inextricably entangled with all other topics of history.
