People with disabilities and ideas related to disability are everywhere in American history.
Just as ethnicity and race are not Either/Or rigid classifications, neither is disability. A person is not always disabled or unable to do all things.
The often arbitrary categories that identify people and the words that describe them have shifted across eras and locations. For example, concepts of beauty and comeliness were different when physical injury, smallpox marks, and other scarring were more common.
Nor has how or if a person uses words always been a universal measure of worth. People process information in many different ways. Likewise, a person might have left school to work in a mill before learning to read, might have used a language other than English, or might have had other differences that made their writing and reading atypical.
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This group includes four women in shirt-waisted clothing, their thick hair tied up in buns, and three men in suits, their hair parted down the middle. One man, thinner than the others, is seated in a wicker wheelchair in the center of the group, head turned toward the camera. All have ribbons pinned to their clothing and are touching and rubbing shoulders together.
Ideas related to disability are often just beneath the surface, such as this drawing of the Statue of Liberty with the supporting scaffolds used to support it as it was built.
This young girl in a wheelchair with suspension support for her head and shoulders is a living version of the Statue of Liberty under construction.
In this group of twelve young people on an outing, the women hold long--stemmed vegetables or flowers and one man has a rifle. Another young man, who in other pictures uses a wheelchair, is seated in the front left corner of the group holding an open book.
A mother and father with their three young sons smile for a family portrait. The father is seated in a wicker wheelchair self-propelled by levers. They all wear hats and the boys have short pants.
A mother and father with three young children pose in front of their car. The father, wearing cowboy boots and a striped cowboy shirt, sits in a hospital-style wheelchair, holding the smallest child on his lap. The mother stands behind the father, her hands resting affectionately on his shoulders. The other children hold the sides of the chair; one wears saddle shoes.