Master of Arts in History, Youngstown State University, 2016, Department of Humanities

In late imperial Russia (1861-1917), both scientific and creative elites readily used illness and disability as metaphors for the societal and political crisis that befell the Tsarist regime. These mainstream elites—be they medical doctors, anthropologists, writers, or artists—held complex views of the ill and disabled, seeing them simultaneously as symbols of wisdom and purity as well as dysfunction and degeneration. Whether perceived in a positive or negative light by elites, the ill and disabled were subject to inequitable power structures in which they were reduced to objects of loathing, pity, or fascination. This thesis explores elite attitudes to these marginalized populations as revealed through Russian belles-lettres, medical literature, artwork, and Tsarist education policy. The ill and disabled became a convenient segue for imperial elites to debate the important topics of the fin de siecle from public health to national security. This thesis shows that the ill and disabled—while on the margins of society—were at the center of attention when elites like scientists, artists, and bureaucrats argued for social and professional reform or for the preservation of the Tsarist autocracy.

Committee: Brian Bonhomme PhD (Advisor); Daniel Ayana PhD (Committee Member); Helene Sinnreich PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Ethics; Health Care; Mental Health; Russian History

Master of Liberal Studies, University of Toledo, 2014, Liberal Studies

The eugenics movement targeted people who were blind and visually impaired as part of "the unfit" members of society who needed to be prevented from passing on their blindness to successive generations. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, eugenicists, blindness professionals, and even other blind people believed that the best way to eliminate blindness was through the restriction of marriages between blind people. Ophthalmologist Lucien Howe repeatedly attempted to secure legislation barring blind people from marrying. Blindness professionals, especially educators, stressed the importance of the separation of the sexes in residential schools for the blind as the way in which to prevent blind marriages and intermarriages, and thus to prevent future generations of blind people. Blind people's assessment of their own marriageability was complex and sometimes contradictory. While some shirked contemporary views, most others accepted and promoted the eugenic idea that hereditary blindness should not be passed to the next generation. Many historians have previously overlooked the unique and rich history of blind people in the United States. This research hopes to illuminate an important aspect of that history.

Committee: Kim Nielsen (Committee Chair); Liat Ben-Moshe (Committee Member); Diane Britton (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Education History; Gender Studies; History; Personal Relationships; Special Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, History

"With Minds Fixed on the Horrors of War" examines the expansion of federal disability policy in the wake of World War II by focusing on the rise and decline of the major activist organization for disabled civilians, the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH). During World War II, with labor shortages threatening production and concerns for the disabled soldier playing heavily on their thoughts, federal officials launched a campaign to expand employment opportunities for people with disabilities. Indeed, many employers developed elaborate plans for employing people with disabilities during the war, and 83 percent of the nation's factories had disabled workers on their payrolls. At the end of the war, liberal policy makers, organized labor, and disability activists in the AFPH, as well as officials in the federal government, all played important roles in fashioning disability policy. These groups did not always work in concert; their differences did much to limit the reach of the disability policy of the postwar decades. Liberals em-braced disability policy as a crucial component in the postwar legislative expansion of the welfare state, but could not agree on the underlying purpose of disability policy and its administration. Social welfare professionals, and the liberals that aligned with them, wanted disability policy in the hands of medical professionals in the Federal Security Agency, who could provide treatment and care for people with disabilities, while labor liberals argued that people with disabilities deserved the dignity of work and that the proper administrative home for disability policy was in the Department of Labor. For their part, disability activists in the AFPH exposed widespread discrimination and the failings of disability policy, while pushing for increased employment opportunities in the postwar economy. Based on archival research in government, union, and AFPH documents and extensive reading of contemporary periodicals, m (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Susan Hartmann PhD (Advisor); Kevin Boyle PhD (Committee Member); Warren Van Tine PhD (Committee Member); Paul Longmore PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2014, College of Languages, Literature, and Social Sciences

An assortment of historical artifacts and documents currently reside at the Northwest Ohio Psychiatric Hospital (NOPH). NOPH is an operating state psychiatric hospital located on the site of the original Toledo Asylum for the Insane, later named the Toledo State Hospital (TSH). There is potential for this collection to be transformed from a room of interesting objects into a professionally operating museum. The location of the museum, on the historic grounds of the TSH, provides an opportunity to create a unique sense of place to connect NOPH residents, staff, and the greater Toledo community to the often hidden histories of the Toledo State Hospital, mental illness, and institutionalization. The Toledo Asylum for the Insane received its first patient in January of 1888, during the peak of asylum building in the United States. The facility, constructed on the cottage plan, represented a new approach in the treatment and care of individuals with mental illness. A detailed history of the institution, gathered through state and local public records, reveals its significance both locally and more broadly representing themes and changes in the field of care for people with mental illness. Disability history and public history set the backdrop for the proposed museum and the application of museum standards and best practices create the framework to professionally exhibit and interpret the history.

Committee: Diane Britton Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Kim Nielsen Ph.D. (Committee Member); Tracie Evans M.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: History

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2012, History

To date, studies of eugenics artificially confine their focus to the movement's application to race, socio-economic status, and the forced sterilization of the so-called feebleminded. However, the segregationist aspect of the eugenics design in the United States brought with it damaging policies toward individuals with physical and mental disabilities. The impact of the broad scale subscription to eugenic rhetoric and practice as applied to marginalized social groups was evident in all facets of society. It was, however, particularly revealing when one undertakes an analysis of the movement's application to the evolution of the special education system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Separation of disabled students, whether in the form of outright exclusion in the residential state schools, or segregation in isolated sight-saving classrooms in the common schools, was one of the strongest illustrations of negative eugenics. It implicated a classification and sorting system that utilized economic productivity as an assertedly objective measure of value and desirability. This scheme allowed for differentiation between the deserving and the undeserving in the extension of the full rights and benefits of U.S. citizenship during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The end of a desirable citizenry was achieved through the outright exclusion of students with disabilities, and later through segregated classrooms in the common schools following states' enactment of compulsory attendance statutes. Like other states, Ohio did not eliminate its exclusionary practices with its shift to segregated sight-saving classes. It shifted the form to intra-district segregation. Special education institutionalized the idea of the “undesirable” student. Segregated classrooms provided a vehicle to continue the tracking system that predetermined which students were likely to mature into valuable contributors to the expanding industrial state, and therefore desirable and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Diane Britton (Committee Chair) Subjects: American History; Curricula; Education; Educational Psychology; Educational Sociology; Educational Theory; History; Law; Legal Studies; Psychological Tests; Psychology; Quantitative Psychology; Secondary Education

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, History of Art

In a 1960 article entitled “Younger American Painters,” William Rubin accused Rauschenberg's Combines of rendering the “inherently biographical style of Abstract Expressionism… even more personal, more particular, and sometimes almost embarrassingly private.” Rubin's choice of the word “embarrassingly” is telling; the Combines are not just private, but embarrassingly so; that is, the problem the Combines present is that they are not private when good sense/taste tells us they should be. This spilling over of the supposed-to-be-private into the embarrassingly deviant public has been read as an insistence on the work of art as both in its environment and in communication with it, as a valorization of the femininity associated with the interior/personal and relatedly, as a refusal of heteronormative subjectivity as dictated in the Cold War era. This paper suggests another reading—not as an alternative, but as a supplement to these: a reading of Rauschenberg's Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg's Combines are debased (and there seems to be some agreement that they are), and if one's experience of them is bodily (and this experience seems if not universal, then nearly so), then their association with the debased/abject body demands inquiry. Made up of disparate parts that insist upon their discrete, adjunctive identities and former lives, the Combines might be best understood as Frankensteins—disabled bodies that refuse to comply and in so doing inscribe new ways of being (corporeally) in the world.

Committee: Lisa Florman (Advisor); Erica Levin (Committee Member); J.T. Richardson Eisenhauer (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art History; Ethics; Fine Arts; Minority and Ethnic Groups

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This dissertation analyzes business and administrative communication to demonstrate how composing ability is rhetorically figured and incorporated. Using rhetorical theory, this dissertation studies the rhetorical tropes present in documents from Early Modern English business and administrative communication. It considers how these tropes are central to the hegemonic compositional techniques, which is believed to be the ability to compose. Through textual analysis of early modern business documents, this dissertation shows how these tropes enable the production of business and administrative communication. Of the variety of business and administrative communication produced during the early modern period, this dissertation specifically considers the letters of merchants as a generic form of business and administrative communication. Studying the generic situation of these merchant letters demonstrates how the hegemonic tropes become central to composing ability. The generic situation, substance, style, and situation, establish the contours of these tropes. Thus, this dissertation analyzes the fused triad of substance, style and situation in Early Modern English business and administrative communication to locate both genre and to begin the process of deciphering an act isolated in time that may also represent an undercurrent of history central to the rhetorics of incorporating ability.

Committee: Brenda Brueggemann (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Rhetoric and Composition