Creating Accessible Pasts and Futures: Archival Representations and Public Memory of Disability at Union College

Using the frameworks of disability studies and critical archival theory, this thesis explores select historical figures with disabilities at Union College. The lives and legacies of Frank Parker Day (1881-1950), Charles Waldron (1883-1975), Tayler Lewis (1802-1877), and Charles Steinmetz (1865-1923) demonstrate that disability and accessibility played out very differently for each of these figures at the same institution. Disability history is often disregarded, so relevant archival materials are rarely cataloged or described through a disability-attentive lens. When people with disabilities can be identified in archival material, their voices are often marginalized, and they may only be represented through the perspectives of non-disabled recordkeepers. Despite this, as my work illustrates, disabled people have been central to the making of Union. Further, studying lived experiences of disability reveals rich and varied insights into cultural understandings of independence, community, leadership, war, race, gender, and citizenship. As I engage with archival materials, I analyze the language and rhetoric used to describe disability in both primary sources themselves, and in the description and metadata that facilitates-or hinders-the findability of these resources by contemporary researchers. I critique the partialities and absences of the sources, highlighting those archival subjects who are granted agency and those who are not. Further, I contextualize the experiences of the figures I am studying within historical and political realities, related not only to disability history or the history of Union, but to American history at large. This thesis ultimately demonstrates the need to cultivate access, as defined in both critical archival theory and in disability studies: access to underrepresented stories in institutional histories, and access for disabled people in institutional life.