A Disability History of the United States

Content Warning: This section discusses ableism, racism, enslavement, and mental illness. The source text’s use of outdated and offensive terms is replicated only in quotations.

Born in Massachusetts in 1663, Mather was an influential Puritan theologian and religious leader. In Chapter 2, Nielsen explains that Mather considered his own speech disorder of stuttering “a punishment for sin” (26). Nielsen references Mather again in Chapter 3 regarding his wife’s “madness,” which he feared would “bring a ruin on [his] ministry” (36). Nielsen uses Mather’s personal reflections on disability to showcase some of the attitudes toward disability at various moments in US history.

In Chapter 3, Nielsen describes Otis as a “revolutionary thinker and hero” and points out that he was credited with the phrase “taxation without representation is tyranny” (33). Born in Massachusetts in 1725, Otis was “believed to have developed insanity, but his prior political leadership, and his family’s money and stability, meant that he experienced a less traumatic community response” (33). By recounting Otis’s story, Nielsen illustrates how disability intersects with other identity factors including race, gender, and class; hence, she shows that Otis’s own experience with disability was inflected by his political and class privilege.