 Helo! I welcome to Histfest 2021, coming live from living rooms around the country. My name is Rebecca Readeel and I'm the Director of Histfest, and I'm so excited to share this weekend's events with you. Please do check out everything else that's going on via the website www.histfest.org. Also please do use the hashtag Histfest2021 if you're sharing thoughts and opinions on them social media. Before we get started I just want to run through some housekeeping using the menu above you can provide feedback to the event and and if you wish also donate to the British Library, the library is a charity and your sport really does help and open up a world of knowledge and inspiration to everyone and the there will be a short audience Q&A at the end of the discussion. If you'd like to submit questions for the speakers, please do so using the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. captions and sign language are available during this talk as well, you can enable captions using a the option at the bottom of the screen, or we're going to post a link in the chat so that you can view the captions in the browser, you can also pin Gabby, well not literally, but the sign language interpreter so that you can see that more clearly as well. Now, without further ado i'm truly delighted to introduce our first event of the festival disability in the industrial revolution pit men politicians activists and artists. A discussion with leading scholar of disability history and author of disability the 18th century sorry in 18th century England imagining physical impairment Dr David Turner. And historian award winning disability rights activist and campaigner Dr Amy Kavanaugh over to you. So everybody lovely to be here very excited to be at his first and i'm Dr Amy Kavanaugh and with me is Dr David Turner hello and we're going to talk about disability history today and i'm going to leap right in with my questions if that's all right with you David. Yeah, by the way, so disability history. Is kind of still treated as as new territory in exploring the past, can you reflect David on kind of why historians slow to explore disability as a category of history, and why is it an important experience that we need to be including in our stories about the past. Yeah, it's good starting points really and why are disabled people excluded from the histories that we write well I suppose there's lots of reasons for that one is that there's an assumption that disabled people are too marginalized to be important or that the only disabled people who matter of people who somehow overcome their impairments and achieved something against the odds. I think there's also a view that there aren't enough sources to study disabled people in the past and that disabled people's experience has always hidden from history. But but that's just not true, really, and I think when you start looking at sources when you start to look for disability in a wide variety of historical texts and images, then you find that disabled people are absolutely everywhere, even though they are outside of the mainstream histories that we write and it's really important to include disabled people in our understanding of the past because. Because disability is part of everyone's experience really I mean you might be you might consider yourself disabled now, but if you don't then the chances are that you know somebody in your in your family who's disabled but you. And that's if you live long enough, you will become disabled so so disability history is the history of all of us. Absolutely I think it's important to to reflect on the fact that you know before modern medicine in the type of work that people did in the prevalence of warfare there were many reasons to acquire disability or to exist as a disabled person in the past. What I found really interesting about your book David is that you talk about the fact that there's been an assumption that disabled people were not part of industrialisation and that there was this shift from disabled people being able to work and be productive in in the home. But as soon as a more industrial and modern society came along, the disabled people stopping part of the picture, and the only histories we get around disability traditionally have been about institutions. I wondered if you could kind of reflect a little bit on that. Yeah. I mean you're absolutely right. There has been this sort of image of the industrial revolution as being like a moment where it all goes wrong to disabled people. So before industrialisation, people work predominantly in the home or close to home and this supposedly enable people to be more integrated into social and economic life. But then industrialisation, which is often seen in a very narrow way as sort of the rise of the factory, but of course industrialisation is a much wider process than that, a more complicated process than that. Industrialisation comes along, people are expected to work faster, to produce goods to a certain standard. They're subject to greater discipline about when they start and finish work in the day. And so this has been argued sort of pushes disabled people out of the workplace and where do they end up? Well, the view is that they tend to be segregated in institutions, in sirens, in workhouses, and so on. There's a certain truth to that, but it's by no means the whole of the picture. And what I was really surprised to find when I was looking at the history of disability in the coal industry, which is absolutely crucial to Britain's industrial development in the 19th and 20th centuries, is that disabled people are absolutely everywhere. They are working in coal mines, they're working on the surface, they are visible members of coal fields communities, and they're there in other industrial societies as well. So visitors to the large textile manufacturing towns and cities in the north of England in the 1830s and 40s, for example, are really struck by the number of disabled people that they're encountering on the streets. So rather than disability being segregated or sort of hidden away from society in the 19th century, what you actually see is something very different actually of disability being absolutely everywhere in industrial society. And people commenting on that and reflecting on that as a way of thinking about the bigger changes that are going on in Britain and other European countries at this time. It's an interesting parallel, isn't it? Because as an activist over the last year, one of the things that the disability community have been pointing out is that working from home is actually very accessible for a lot of disabled people. And that many disabled people in the workplace have asked to work from home and been denied that, being told, oh, that's not possible, we can't achieve that. And then the pandemic happens and within two weeks everything's online. So it's interesting to reflect on that dichotomy about what is achievable and where where work takes takes place, you know, it's quite a historical conversation actually. Now we've been using the word disability. And in my work as a disability activist, I talk a lot about something called the social model of disability. So this is the idea that disability is created by social and physical barriers rather than impairments. For example, a wheelchair user is disabled by a lack of ramps instead of stairs, not because they use a wheelchair. So in your work, have you found that there are historically different ideas about disability? What it means? And are there any comparisons with our modern concepts, including an idea like the social model? Yeah. I mean, ideas about disability change over time, you know. So understanding that disability don't stay the same. They change, they are shaped by the different historical contexts in which disabled people live. So the social model of disability is something that emerges through the disability rights movements in quite recent times in the 1970s is when we start to see that idea really being expressed and conceptualised. That was itself was a reaction to the medical model of disability, which takes a very different view that the problem of disability resides in the individual rather than in the wider society. So you are disabled because you can't do certain kinds of things rather than because of the way society is configured. And the medical model itself is the product of certain historical processes and the medical model isn't constant throughout history as well. So it's something that starts to take shape really in the late 19th century, but particularly after the First World War. It's linked to medical balance cycle pedics. Now when you go further back into time, which is what I'm more interested in now when we get the 18th century and the 19th century, then these kind of modern concepts, the social model and the medical model are very difficult to apply. To the experiences of people living at their time and difficult to find sources that kind of fit into these kinds of modern ways of thinking about disability. But one thing that's really interesting is that the idea of disability as something which is shaped by social and cultural factors, which is a really important principle of the social model of disability. That isn't entirely new to the late 20th century. So you do find people in the 19th century talking about disability in those terms. And I've been working on a project recently with my colleague Daniel Black who I think is in the audience to this event. So shout out to Dan. Dan and I are interested in the early history of disabled people's political activism. And so we found some writers in the early 1840s sort of talking about disability in those kinds of terms. A problem that isn't just an individual misfortune, but it's created because of the way in which society treats people who are physically different. So one of the writers we're interested in is a man called William Dodd, who was employed by factory reformers to go on a tour of northern England. Dodd himself had worked in a factory and he had lost his arm as a result of an accident and so he wasn't able to work anymore in a textile factory. But he was employed by Lord Ashley who was the key philanthropist behind factory reform to go on this tour around northern England. And they was trying to get some evidence of how bad things were in factories. But Dodd went a bit further than that. He actually sought out fellow disabled people and started to gather their experiences and he records these hundreds of interviews that he does with disabled workers. And he starts to kind of think about, well, their problems sort of, they lie beyond simple questions of working conditions in factories. It's about sort of compensation. It's about how these people looked after after the accident, how they are cared for by their communities, what role their employers continue to take. It ends up taking responsibility for the accidents that have befallen them. And so, you know, he talks about a lot about compensation as being a really important issue for disabled industrial workers. And, you know, he says at one point we demand something better than the kind of, you know, than the other kinds of wealth there that was available for those workers. So it's really fascinating to find early examples of activists presenting disability in those kind of social, cultural and economic terms, not just subscribing to the view that disability is an individual misfortune. But these people are people of their time and they see disability quite differently to a modern social model, but they're thinking of those kinds of terms, even if they don't express it in the way that modern activists have done. It's interesting to hear about that kind of community building because that's something I'm very familiar with. You know, someone that was born disabled but became, you know, kind of more aware of disability activism later in life. And later was my version of Dodds going round, you know, chatting to everybody was that kind of discovering, oh my goodness, there's, there's a whole community out here of people with different experiences. So it's quite kind of heartening to see that experience reflected in the past. So you're saying that, you know, that, you know, we don't talk about disability in the same way as it was maybe referred to historically. I think I found really interesting because, again, in my own work, a lot of people say, I'm very worried about words, like what words should I use when I describe a disabled person, or how do disabled people refer to themselves. Quite often people use euphemisms like differently abled or other kind of cringeworthy characteristics like that. There are different types of language in your book and in your work about how people were described with long-term conditions, injuries and disabilities. Can you sort of reflect on some of those words and the language and what they meant and how they referred to people? Yeah, and the language of disability is complex, historically. On one hand it's very blunt and people in the past use words that we today find offensive. So, you know, common words to describe someone with physical impairment, for example, to call them a cripple, or to describe them as lame. And, you know, those are, those are seen nowadays as very negative terms, particularly when they're used by people outside of the disability community. So, you know, so that maybe reflects a kind of, sort of a lack of embarrassment maybe about sort of, took up disability in very kind of, you know, direct terms, I suppose, that there wasn't a sort of sense of offence around certain words in the past that we have today. And, you know, these are, these, you know, the term like cripple is quite an objectifying term. It's sort of, it's bound up with ideas of, you know, kind of incapacity but also pity. But also disabled people are using those terms themselves to describe themselves. So going back to William Dodd, who I was talking about a moment ago, he calls himself the factory cripple. And he kind of, he always reclaims that term in the way that disabled people reclaim the term cripp today as a, as a more positive identity term. So, you know, there is a kind of, you know, so, you know, we shouldn't assume that this language is simply used to describe, by non-disabled people to describe disabled people, disabled people using those terms themselves. In terms of the word disabled, then this is a word that's used particularly to describe someone who's unable to do paid work. And I emphasize paid work because disabled people in the past like they do today do a lot of unpaid work and emotional labour and care work as well. But in the past people are very, they can say about paid work. And so, and in the Victorian periods, this term disabled can be used either to describe someone who's disabled from doing their normal kinds of work. So, you know, coal miner who's injured in an accident who's not able to go back to cutting coal, but they're not necessarily incapacitated from doing anything at all. Or it can also refer to total disability, so that someone is incapacitated from any kinds of work altogether. And then you get words which aren't sort of obvious disability words. And some of these are closely linked to occupation class. So, one of the terms that we see quite a lot in industrial contexts in the 19th century is the term worn out. Somebody being imagined the body like a machine. So you're worked until you're unable to work anymore. So you're worn out like a part of a machinery. And this is a very powerful way of conceptualising the role of the worker in this new capitalist industrial economy. And people also have conceptualised disability in terms of premature ageing as well, and this is closely linked to the idea of being worn out. So you get a lot of commentary about workers in particular industries being worn out at younger ages. So coal miners, for example, are seen as sort of at their peak in their 20s. But by the age of 30, they're starting to succumb to chronic diseases, particularly in coal fields like Scotland, where the coal is very dusty and this causes a lot of lung diseases. So 40 commentators saying, well, miners are largely disabled by the age of 40. Some are carrying on in mine work, but in much fewer numbers. And then by 50, they are at the end of their working lives, at least as far as working in a mine's concern. So the idea of industrial work to speeding up people's life cycles, making them old before their time, is a really powerful thing in a lot of writing from that period. It's really interesting, isn't it? Because I found the use of the word kind of worn out. It is really powerful, like you say, somebody's like part of a machine, but also the way that that was associated with what became called the rest. So where if you were considered perhaps temporarily disabled or having a condition that was temporarily taking away your capacity to work, you could go for the rest. And then it was kind of a ratio between how worn out you were and how capable you were of recovering. And these ideas, it's almost like they're, you know, being sent off to recharge their batteries or how, you know, tune up the engine, which is a really interesting kind of reflection on how there is that understanding that people can recover or people can find different function or find different capacity. And it's reassuring for a disabled person, you know, of the 21st century to see disability understood in a slightly more flexible way. Because as a blind person, you know, people see a white cane or a guide dog and they assume it's a binary, you know, you can either see nothing or you can see completely fine. And it's, it's that's kind of that understanding of those gray areas of experience seems so much more present in the 19th century because I suppose they're a lot more common people, you know, went through illness and impairment. And really that leads on to kind of the next area I want to reflect on, which is what I really enjoyed about the book is how it demonstrated that, you know, disability didn't necessarily mean exclusion from the workplace. And actually, there were very specific roles for disabled people that became sort of carved out as a space for disabled people being able to access work. Could you tell us a little bit more about those, David? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, just going back to your previous point, I mean, there is a real expectation that your work as long as you're able to, you know, that this is a period before old age retirement, for example. So people are really sort of expected to get to get to try and get back into work after serious injury, for example, even if that left them impaired in some way. So we do find cases in coal mining of men with wooden legs working underground. Sometimes they are helped by others. So in parts of South Wales, for example, coal miners continue to work in family groups through much of the 19th century. And so having your family around you might be quite helpful if you're a disabled person. And sometimes you actually have disabled miners employing others as personal assistants, actually underground. So in 1842, there's a big government investigation into the employment of children in coal mines, which reveals all this kind of extent of disabled people's working in this industry. It's in Pembrokeshire where women and girls are still working underground in the early 19th century. There's one old miner who's employed his neighbour's daughter to go underground with him to help him to cut coal because he's lost his leg and he can't work as well as he used to. So you do find disabled people working underground just going back to the same kind of work that they used to do, but of course not everybody's able to do that. And so you also find work being found for disabled miners on the surface. So there's a wide range of jobs at the 19th century coal mine. It's quite an occupation diverse industry mining and that sort of enables people to participate in certain roles. For example, in tending the lamps that miners use, sometimes in cases of disabled miners, the employer's knock us up. So these are people that go around waking people up in the morning. It's a popular job, I'm sure, in the 19th century mining village. So men are able to continue to work and I think in terms of this idea that the male breadwinner, this is very important, although some of this work is lower status. So another important thing about mining is that there's all kinds of work, but it's very hierarchical. And so if you're able to go back to cutting coal, then you're at the top of the working hierarchy. But if you go back to working in the lamp room, for example, that's boys work, or younger inexperienced workers do. So to be a sort of middle-aged miner going to that kind of work could be demeaning, even though it enables him to continue and work. You find people going back and disabled miners sometimes going to work in their local communities, doing other work. And one thing that's really interesting is the number of disabled workers who find jobs and teaching in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. So village schools are going to have some disabled workers teaching children, quite a lot of disabled children in the class, actually, because education might be a way of training for a different kind of work. So this is quite an important role in a working class community. It carries a lot of status, but it's increasingly challenged as time goes on because education becomes more professionalised as the 19th century wears on. And so these men who kind of drift into teaching because they're disabled from other kinds of work eventually get pushed out of education as more emphasis on formally educated people going into the teaching profession. It's interesting about the fact that in the book you talk about disabled men having to do boys work and that classic image for most of us that never a tiny bit or have been to a local museum about mining is that image of the small child in the dark opening a door. But actually in quite a few cases it was going to be a disabled older man potentially doing that job as well, which sort of leads on to my next area that I wanted to chat about which is about how disabled people were kind of used included and excluded from protest movements and particularly an early ideas of what we would now consider like a union. So for me, as someone that spends a lot of time on social media, I often see disabled people being co-opted to forward a particular argument or to counteract a particular argument. And actually quite a good comparison at the moment is around environmentalism and how disabled people are simultaneously excluded by some things like banning plastic straws, or then utilised to say that we should keep cars on the street instead of of bikes. And I found it really interesting how disabled miners in particular had that similar experience, you know they sort of became almost like poster cripples of certain movements that either they would be representing destitution and you know the hard labour or they would sometimes be used as as strike breakers to then actually kind of get more work. And I thought that was a really interesting kind of juxtaposition. So can you explore a little bit more of that for us? Yeah so yeah this idea of a poster cripple is really interesting I think and you know disabled people are used and exploited in various campaigns today and that's the case in the past as well. So by the time you get to the mid 19th century where trade unions are becoming established, disability is being used to encourage people to sign up and join a union because you know trade unions use statistics about the high rates of disablements in industries like mining. As the reason why men need to join the union because actually because it's by coming together with others that they can fight for the cause of better compensation and care. When when when when disablement inevitably comes because you know it's a sense of it, you know that we will become disabled if you're working this very dangerous industry. So so yeah and then unions sort of exploit images of suffering of disabled people in their propaganda. So this is particularly evidence in the 1840s in the northeast culture, one of the areas that we looked at in this project and in the 1840s a string of really nasty sort of industrial relations, really poor industrial relations between miners and their employers and the acrimonious disputes, so there's a big strike in 1844 for example and during that strike. One of the tactics that employers use to try and break the morale of strikers was to evict them from their homes because lots of coal miners lived in accommodation that was owns by their employer. And so it was a place where there was a lot of power over workers and and so so evictions do take place during these particularly long lasting and acrimonious disputes by the one in 1844 and have other examples as well and so the union sort of pick up on on the the eviction of older people and disabled people. And when they're talking about this because it's show in the eyes of the unions this is this really shows the callousness of the employers that they down just evicting healthy young miners who are campaigning for better pay but they are also evicting disabled people throwing them out on the streets as a very vivid image from the illustrated London news in the mid 19th century where miners camped on the side of a road and one of them is a disabled man and it's very powerfully evokes the kind of hardship that strikers faced. So, so these kinds of images really kind of powerful and very kind of useful for unions in trying to garner sympathy for that cause and it appeals to people sense of fairness and all the kind of Christian duty of charity towards disabled people. And so, so these images are exploited to a certain extent in those kinds of disputes and yeah and. Really are there are a lot of modern parallels with that. Yeah, even if you think about the way that images of you know charity drives now the way that images of disabled children say for example used to encourage you know donations and or you know to speak for an issue. It's a it's a really interesting current that runs through our history and culture that when you want to show suffering or in you know indifference or inequality that an image of a disabled person seems to be the one that you'll go to. So, I think the next question I'm just going to ask, sort of draw our chat to a close. And people can put questions in the chat and through the Q&A, but you know at the start of our discussion David we did we reflected on, you know disability history still being quite an under research topic. And certainly for me, you know I call myself a lapsed historian. So I used to be a historian, and I left academia, and as I've been fairly public about it is because I found it very inaccessible, and I encountered a lot of academic ableism as a disabled historian. And more broadly, you know that I think there are certainly factors that we can reflect on around. You know why isn't there enough disability history, and not just from professional historians but for the general public as well, and kind of what what barriers are there and what solutions do you think there are to those barriers. I think we could talk for another hour about this Amy, I'm sure because you know there are so many barriers we still need to challenge really I think. Well, you know that there are. I think I think one of the things is is about making just raising awareness of this kind of history at all to the beginning about some of the perceptions that people have about disabled people, really not having a history or only kind of exceptional disabled people having a history. And I think we need to to challenge those kinds of assumptions so, so it's fantastic that his best is starting off with an event on disability history and so many people are here because it shows this is important and it's a hope this will inspire people to go and find out more. But it doesn't mean that that we need to be be clearer really about what kind of resources there are to study disability history we need to make it more visible in not just in public history on, you know, on TV on radio and some on the internet but also make it visible in terms of how people access it how people can go off and do their own research and how how you actually find disability in the outcome. So I said earlier that disability everywhere, but it's not but but often the most interesting things about disabled people's experiences. I found it as a researcher come from sources which aren't obviously about disability. So, you know, the things I've been talking today but I've been in parliamentary reports and newspapers and things like that. So, so we need to kind of create tools for people to be able to access resources in archives and so we need to need to make. I think we'd have more more more finding guides available and we need to make archives museums more accommodating places as places where disabled people see that history being represented in making that just more more visible more welcoming. And, you know, that those are just some starting points. We do need to make public history more accessible and more welcoming and especially heritage sites which, you know, by their very nature are often very physically inaccessible. But for me, there are so many simple solutions that just, you know, if there are any heritage professionals listening, please do, you know, get in touch because I think, you know, the experiences I've had compared to somewhere like the Mary Rose Museum, where as a blind person I could actually touch the ropes that were on the Mary Rose. And then I go to Churchill's house and the touch tour allows me to fondle mid 20th century fish cabinet, which, as I'm sure you can imagine, was a square, and not particularly interesting to feel and I didn't really get much information from it. So I think it's, it's really important to reflect on how we can bring disability history to the wider public, but also to more disabled people. And that's why virtual events like this are so fantastic, because I'm here in my slippers, and it's nice and accessible to me, and hopefully it's been accessible to other people too. So we think now Rebecca is going to join us and we're going to go to the Q&A. Hello, hello. Hopefully you can see me. And that was such an illuminating discussion. Thank you both of you for that. And thank you, Amy, for being so generous with your sharing your experiences as well. And we've got lots of questions. And so the first one that I'm going to ask you has popped up from a couple of people, and it's about the intersection between disability history and women, particularly because as one of the question askers has asked. Women have lots of chronic illnesses that have not been focused upon enough in the past. So I wonder if there's anything to say about that. And yeah, there's, I mean, that's a really good point. And I'm glad someone's raised that because, you know, I've been talking about coal mining here, which is a very masculine industry, but not exclusively and women are, so are employed in coal mines in some parts of the country until 1842. So, but it's certainly true that women's experiences have been marginalising disability history. And there are many reasons for that. One is going back to something I said earlier on about how the idea of being disabled or disabilities is so often related to paid work, which is traditionally kind of masculine sphere. And so, and so women's experiences are less visible there. So, and yeah, and I think there's a tendency to, as the question has said, you know that the chronic illnesses aren't taken as seriously perhaps as other kinds of impairment. So there is, I think, throughout history, there have been sort of hierarchies of disability and different degrees of visibility. And the classic example being the amputee soldier or sailor who is a very conspicuous figure and is, you know, the focus of all kinds of patriotic imagery and quite positive portrayals of disability. Whereas a chronic illness is invisible and it tends to, you know, things like chronic pain, women are today still far less likely to be taken seriously by doctors when they talk about chronic pain or far less likely to kind of be offered medication than men are. So, so this is kind of all so so a whole variety of factors we serve to marginalize disabled women's experiences. So I think, you know, as we try and open up disability history, looking at, you know, we need to pay more attention to the experiences of women, the experiences of people of color, and others who are marginalized within disability history. I think it's worth tooting David's horn a little bit because he does have a whole chapter on family life and reflects a lot on the experiences of women in mining communities as disabled people and is also still often the case today disabled people who are caring for other disabled people. I think if you are interested in that sort of history, you know, the one area where it is quite overlapping is around mental health history, and particularly I would say it usually middle class women's experience of mental health care and treatment. It's kind of an overlapping area where disability is very, very much the focus through a lens of both feminist history, but also kind of the male gaze as a historical analysis and there is some really good stuff about that. I'll just quickly follow on from that point as well, and just going deeper into, well, and David's point I should say, Warren has a question, he says that he's a full time wheelchair user who is also a teacher and a social worker, and he finds it, and I hope you don't mind me saying this, it's frustrating that disability history and disability issues don't get the same level of seriousness as other forms of societal oppression. What can and could be done to rectify this, I guess it is a question for both of you. Amy, do you want to go first on this? I think more events like this is great. And I think that it speaks, you know, what we're talking about at the beginning of the session is that disabled people, it feels like from a lot of historians perspectives we were invented in the 1960s unless we were soldiers. So I think there needs to be a bit of a turn, as the historians say, we need a disability turn. And I think that there are lots of excellent disabled historians, I think more public disability history is needed. It is coming in there and I know Greg Jenner is part of the programme and is a really big champion for popular disability histories and his books feature disabled people who have disabilities and he highlights it and says, you know, this bit is often written out as if it's an irrelevant part of their experience. So I think that's the thing people, especially lots of more popular histories, there's still that level of discomfort around talking about disability as it being part of a lived experience. And I think that's really, you know, that's a kind of attitude we still have to break down. Like it's not an indecent thing to mention that Josephine Baker was a disabled person, you know. I don't think I'd add much more to that really. I think teaching more disability history in schools is really important, I think. And you know, I'm really interested in what happens when you look at big topics like the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of people who normally marginalise from that story. And I think there's some really interesting stories to tell about not just about disabled people's lives but looking at big events from a disability perspective bring something new to our understanding of that. So, you know, more of it. Another question that's popped up a couple of times and I'm afraid the original poster of this question has scrolled up so I can't name check but I can name check and who's asked a similar question, which is about whether we have any information or histories of people with developmental disabilities in the historical record and if we do what does that say, you know, what does that tell us and says that she's an autistic person and particularly interested in this. I mean there's quite a lot from the census because, and this is when I was talking about language before and it's something that I have to educate a lot of people on social media is words like idiot and imbecile. And these are physical categories like that that was your, your condition. And these are often words used for people with with cognitive disabilities. So I would say from. There's a lot of this kind of classic institutional histories of those experiences, both from the perspective of the workhouse and poverty, but again also from certainly my expertise around mental health, you know, the more middle class experience being a little bit more genteel. If you had a had a condition that would usually be, you know, interpreted some, especially in women would be interpreted as, you know, a uterine condition gone wrong. I don't know if you've got any more thoughts on that David. It's a big topic to answer in a minute or so, but I know some just put a message in the chat a moment ago about asking for recommendations for reading and what a book I'd really recommend if you're if you're interested in in this is a fantastic which came out last year by Simon Jarrett on the history of learning disability in the 18th century to the present. And, you know, Simon described, you know, world in the 18th century, where people with developmental disability were very very much included in society. But but they become disproportionately institutionalized as the 19th century goes on institutionalization, not a universal experience for disabled people. But if you if you have a developmental disability, then then your chance of being institutionalized and much greater. And, you know, that's another example of differential treatment of disabled people in the past. And this is where as a former post colonial historian I could wax lyrical about categories of otherness in the 19th century, and has statistics and data used to other people. And that's why a lot of the histories of disability are institutional because those Victorian bureaucrats loved a record. And that's, you know, unfortunately, where a lot of that lived experience that the majority of the historical record that has been previously examined that's where people have gone for it. And we obviously are running a little bit short on time now but we do have a little we do have enough time to ask a couple more questions but I'll start by an anecdote that's been given from Kate. She says that referring to disabled people teaching and on in northeast structure, my great, great aunt was born without arms and taught in the 1860s, she could also sweep floors and bring in cold buckets, and which is a lovely story to having your family history. I want to go to a question that's been raised by a couple of people about reading materials specifically for school age children. Is there anything that you could recommend and putting you on the spot now, or any case studies that might be good to look at that can make, you know, perhaps if there's any young people that might be interesting case studies for school age children. My favourite, and it's a little bit later and she is quite well known, but I think she's a really good example is Rosa Mae Billinghurst, who's known as the crippled suffragette. I think it's great because quite often, you know, suffragettes are already in the curriculum, and with disability history I think where possible where you make it part of the experience and not this kind of siloed off unique we're going to look at disabled people now. Like where you go oh look there you know there's this movement of women and one of them used to use her wheelchair to ram the police, like which I just think. I mean obviously I'm not encouraging children towards civil disobedience but you know it's an interesting example to reflect on of a disabled person being actively involved in in a protest movement which is not something that we get a lot of history of. So she's my favourite example for children. So I've got another question here from Sam and they ask what do you see as underexplored topics in the field of disability history or ideas that should have more focus. That's another big question. Well, I mean, I think, I think, yeah, as we said a moment ago, I think, I think we need more intersectional disability histories, really about sort of how disability connects with race and gender sexuality and so on. So most interesting work is at that interface, both in modern activism and in historical work as well. So we need a more diverse disability history because it does tend to focus on white Western people and I think that's so more disability histories of the global south and more intersectional histories. I think would be really, really useful and also I think more, more history that look into these kind of hidden experiences of chronic illness and chronic pain, which is an area I'm particularly interested in at the moment and how people have experienced disability over time due to their individual biographies. I think that those are kind of areas that I think are really valuable to explore a bit more. I think for me there's kind of two areas I'd like to see more of. So the first is kind of creative and artistic histories of disability beyond the kind of freak show focus because you know disabled people created art and music and culture. And too often that lenses, you know, restricted to how disabled people with the subjects of the gaze. And I'd like to see more about the work that they produce. And as ever, a kind of creative spaces are often refugees for disabled people who live more unconventional lives. I think from a modern perspective as an activist and as a lapsed historian and this is something David's now reflecting on is, we'd love to see more modern oral histories of disability, and that really kind of grassroots movement around collecting those of the lived experience, the stuff that is really missing quite often from the historical record. And there's a great project in America called this visibility. And that is creating a huge archive of those lived experiences. And I think that's something that perhaps we might need to work on in the UK. And, you know, maybe if we can get our thinking caps on, we can make it happen. But because we do have a few minutes left, just to go back to the Industrial Revolution, we had a question and very early on actually that and for David. Do you have any idea about the percentage of the population during this time, or that time I should say that had a disability is compared with today. I wish I did is the answer as a short answer that question because it's very difficult to determine that. So today, just between about fifth and a quarter of people, this is working age adults are disabled and variations around the country. It's very difficult to say that for the 19th century, because although we have the census as a source, disability isn't recorded in the census or for the earlier periods start to get sensory impairments and so forth, idiocy being recorded in the census as time goes on. But even that, you know, it's limited in terms of what we can use. It's difficult, you know, even for, you know, some of the kids industrial accidents to get reliable figures about how many people are injured because there's controversy about what actually is a serious accident. My owners were very reluctant to report these things, even when they were compelled to by law. And, you know, any accidents don't equal disability, so it is really, really difficult to do that. And, you know, so we rely on some more kind of anecdotal accounts, but what I would say actually is in the 1830s when people were, were using disability as kind of evidence for the need to reduce the hours of labour of young children in factories that are to labour activists, creating their own censuses of disabled people. So there's the Macclesfield crippled census, which is not very well known, but someone actually went round the streets in Macclesfield and counted the number of so-called cripples in his community. You can then present as constant evidence of how dangerous silkmoons were in that period. So that's a very interesting, but not enough to really answer that question. Well, we are, I'm afraid, out of time. There are still lots of questions, but if you'd like to continue the conversation on social media afterwards, that's, you know, please do, please do so. Amy and David are both on social media on Twitter. And I'm sure, well, I'm being a bit cheeky here, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind asking questions, she says. Yeah, use the hashtag histvest 2021. And I'm sure we'll find those questions there. But that just leaves me to say a huge thank you to David and to Amy for holding such a wonderful conversation and kicking off histvest 2021 weekend. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. I can't tell if we're live still. I'm just going to put that out there. If we are, then hi everyone still. I'm going to, what I'm going to do is I'm going to let everyone see a guide dog Ava if we are still live. There she is. There we go. Napping away. We've changed. We've changed. Oh. How old is she? She is nearly three. Did you get her as a puppy or? No. So I got her in November. Oh gosh. And does she, how long does the training take? So her training took two years. And then our training together took seven weeks. So what, do they have like a place where all the dogs train? This is just like the sweetest thing ever. So yeah, so Ava's life, she spent the first two years of her life with a puppy raising family. And they taught her how to be a good girl. And then she went to big school and she learned how to be a very good girl. And then there's kind of, that's about a year. And then there's a sort of final portion where they give them kind of all the big tests about, you know, do they understand what a car is and they walk their person into a hole. And then they come and then you get matched and then you train together. So yeah, she, two years. What's the, what, if you don't mind my asking, what's the bond like between the pair of you? Because obviously you have a different relationship to what would be a typical pet owner relationship. Is it, do you feel really like deeply connected to her? Oh, absolutely. Like even like she's, I've only been with her since November and she's made a huge difference. She's big personality, she's very intuitive. She's very good at mental health stuff from having a bad mental health day. She likes to come and sit on me. She just sits on my chest if I'm lying down or like she'll just come and sit on me to be like, don't worry, everything's fine. But she's quite sassy Ava. She, she has a stink eye, we say, and quite often when she has to make a decision. So guide dogs are the only dogs that are trained to disobey their owner. And she has to use her judgment when she disobeys me. And so, for example, if I tell her to take us across a road and she can see that there's a car coming, she'll ignore me. And my other half says when she does that, she then sort of looks up at me like, what, didn't you mum there's a car there, you're such an idiot. And I'm being informed that we need to wrap up now by the powers that be. So I could talk about the sweet little dog forever, but I'm afraid we're going to have to leave. But if people are still with us, just another thank you for joining. And again, thank you to David and Amy. And that is it. We are going. Bye everybody. Thank you.