This article traces and summarises historiographical trends in the history of learning disability. It identifies three major waves of historical approaches beginning with a medicalised analysis which emerged in the early 20th century. This presented a story of medical progress which began with the asylum movement of the 19th century and represented ‘idiots’ as creatures of the asylum and objects of the medicalised gaze. In the 1990s a new social history challenged these assumptions, focusing on the iniquities of institutionalisation and the eugenics period, while attempting to give a voice to people with learning disabilities and their families in their own history. A cultural history movement later emerged to challenge the idea of learning disability as a fixed universal concept over time. It argued that the idea of learning disability (in all its different linguistic iterations) is contingent on time and place, and a product of the culture within which it is framed. Not all work fits neatly into one of these categories, sometimes they overlap and sometimes they cannot be easily categorised. Nevertheless, these broad frames of reference within the historiography of learning disability do point to wider social, cultural and political concerns, which are worth holding in mind as we consider how the ‘work’ of history can and does act to inform attitudes, policy-making and change. The authors describe the encouraging recent emergence of historian activists who seek to write and define their own history, and who may constitute a fourth wave in the historiography of learning disability.

中文翻译：

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学习障碍的历史

本文追溯和总结了学习障碍历史上的历史趋势。它确定了从 20 世纪初出现的医学化分析开始的三大历史方法浪潮。这呈现了一个始于 19 世纪的庇护运动的医学进步故事，并将“白痴”描述为庇护的生物和医学化注视的对象。在 1990 年代，一部新的社会史对这些假设提出了挑战，重点关注制度化和优生学时期的不公平现象，同时试图让学习障碍者及其家人在他们自己的历史中发表意见。后来出现了一场文化历史运动，以挑战将学习障碍作为一个固定的普遍概念的想法。它认为学习障碍的概念（在其所有不同的语言迭代中）取决于时间和地点，并且是其所处文化的产物。并非所有工作都适合这些类别之一，有时它们重叠，有时它们不容易分类。尽管如此，学习障碍史学中的这些广泛的参考框架确实指向更广泛的社会、文化和政治问题，当我们考虑历史的“工作”如何能够并且确实起到告知态度、政策的作用时，这些问题值得牢记在心。制作和改变。作者描述了最近出现的令人鼓舞的历史学家活动家，他们寻求书写和定义自己的历史，他们可能构成学习障碍史学的第四波浪潮。