Starting in the early twentieth century, this chapter surveys the most significant essays about disability and essays written by writers with disabilities, including Helen Keller, Randolph Bourne, Paul K. Longmore, Leonard Kriegel, and Esmé Weijun Wang. Exploring the common themes and the rich variety of styles represented in these essays, the chapter synthesizes a wide array of firsthand experiences by people with blindness, polio, schizophrenia, deformities, multiple sclerosis, and other conditions. Some of these essays highlight the discrimination and exclusion faced by the authors – Longmore’s stories of the financial hardships he faced due to his disability are a particularly compelling example – while others craft a new poetics to describe the singularity and promise of a life lived with a disability. The chapter closes with contemporary essays that illustrate the extent to which the field of disability writing has greatly diversified in the twenty-first century, offering a more extensive record of human experience.

This chapter examines the drive for nationality as it took shape in US culture leading into and out of World War I. Considering primarily the war novel but also the broader political discourses surrounding the war and its fallout, it describes the variety of cultural interests—some right, some left, some ambiguously centrist—that sought to compel, through representations of military intervention abroad, contradictory justifications for national unity. Well into the war’s aftermath, US artists and commentators continued to use the occasion of the conflict to foment a culture of national regeneration: sometimes to promote revitalized masculinity; sometimes to challenge the self-serving values of capitalism; sometimes with hopes of assimilating immigrant factionalism; sometimes—especially during the war years—to propagate subservience to an authoritarian state. Throughout, the chapter  explores how the tensions underpinning  cultural hegemony  constrained or advanced the rhetorical project of national renewal. However, it also acknowledges protests and refusals of that culture of collectivization, often driven by invocations of American ideals. After the war especially,  faith in militarism’s re-enchantment of the nation unraveled  in the face of growing modernist backlash and the wider embrace of cultural pluralism.