Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North

Injury and illness threatened the ability of soldiers to control their bodies, which in turn undermined their ability to maintain independence through labor. [...]during the war and after, the idea of disability remained imbricated with ideas of masculinity and who properly counted as a man. [...]Handley-Cousins examines, in her sixth chapter, the invisible disability of wartime-related psychological trauma. Other secondary sources that shed light on the workings of the Pension Bureau and how it defined disability for nonwhite veterans also go unmentioned, such as Boyd Cothran's analysis of how Indigenous veterans of the Modoc War navigated the pension system.1 These absences result in making white male masculinity and disability seem normative and also suggest a more complex story than what is in this book.