ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how disability historians who have embraced the central tenet of the social model – the claim that disability is indeed socially created – have contributed to the mounting critique of the strong social model. It describes the work of historians who more directly challenge the impairment/disability divide by thinking simultaneously about both biology and society, culture and environment. The chapter offers some thoughts about how disability historians and disability studies scholars might move forward. Disability studies scholars and disability historians do not deny or minimise the existence of impairment. Acknowledging that impairment is indeed socially created, and thereby questioning or challenging the impairment/disability divide does not mean that disability historians must become, or even agree with, historians of medicine. US and European historians, and historians of times, are not the only historians blurring the impairment/disability divide. Centring impairment in these more complex and creative ways has allowed historians to analyse disability outside of traditional industrialised settings.
